Holbein's extraordinary 'Ambassadors' | National Gallery

Well, thank you very much to everyone. Thank you for your help. I'm speaking with Ambassador Holbein. My name is Susan Foyster. The Directorate-General for Social Affairs a further year of reporting I'm not enough for you. The masterpiece Holbein is in the care. So I'll be back in the next 30 minutes. I speak am y painted most anxiously, I don't know what to think. My mod i'm able to give I'm going to be a little more careful. And of course, we'll be happy to do it. I tried to introduce Any other questions You can have me back. Then this is the painting. A goat of the Galerau Genedlaethol In the 1890s. I looked a little different. I was really, You want to do that, I painted Allan. I was fine. Nothing happened. The situation in the country I'm not going to. I didn't know. I'm not going to lie. I was painted in Wales For most of our organizations, it's 19 days. In 1890, The Commission has The Earls of Radnor I'm from Castle Longford. I'm not looking back. - What? The Erasmus programme After you After I left, Ar Ar Gael I'm Galerau Genedlaethol. I'm from the north of France. They're looking for me. Erasmus and the European Union Are you interested in it? I'm going to have to You can I'll see you later. You're not going to be able to do it. The Galerau Genedlaethol Because I have all the information there. So, in 1890, I was down in Gallup. Ariane Ghy with some training I'm going I'm developing this painting. Academic and administrative activities the number of You could have been two ways. I was thinking about you. You could be a Welshman. I was a poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, I didn't mean to hope. I was thinking You could be both French and young, I didn't know anyone was proud. The I could have been in France, We don't know what to do, I'm playing. I didn't know that. After 1900 God bless your Arthur. Mary Harvey, That's good. arendrol Holbein, which is a I'm in the middle of a book deal. I'm not saying that. For your research I'm finished developing. I was in a hurry. The Commission has not yet adopted a decision on the application of this Regulation. through the Wales I'm sharing it with you. I'm a family man. O'r dyn hon, The following shall be added: And I'll tell you what. In a moment. And look at you first. I'm an artist. The following is the text of the statement: You students. I'm not sure. I'm not really Pan would're painting I've been developing my Galeri Genedlaethol It was your artist, We are Hanes Holbein. A chi can weld here, You may be new I want to do it. a look in the painting I'll weld it. o dissolved in I'm not using it. Signed Holbein The city of Cardiff I'm saying Holbein body I've painted this picture. I was in the picture shop. Ac ma'n diddorol - I'm good. significantly I'm going to Holbein. I'm not going to be late. I'm not going to take a picture. I'm not doing anything. A little more common That's it. I'm not taking it. o o Holbein fod body and photography important I'm not alone. Ac mae'n ffotograff most anhygoel The work The whole thing. Nawr, As you may know, I was Holbein. In the case of the United Kingdom, A few years ago working in ac yna first - I'm not sure. Aced The patron of Nghaerdydd School year The European Council I wrote. number of o o o o o o o o In the city of Cardiff, - What's in it? Archbishop o Canterbury a Sir Thomas More. I was looking for you in Cardiff. I'm two years old. Arin o brid, working Henry VIII and Mhryddain The Commission The number of patients for the tent Acyn I was in the hospital. There you go. We don't know. 1532 year 1533 year We're going to paint it. I'm going to go. The following I was like In the In fact o Henry VIII a similar - I'm sure work I'll do that. So I was not a believer. and I was finished. I want to I'm sorry. How to live portrait Boll I'm going to go to the hospital. I was Only artist I do o o b o l Yanna I'm going to go Share in I'm 15 and I'm very happy. I was just saying Holbein. I'm done with it. - I'm not. I'm going to. I'm going to have to. o to make I was just painting. appearance ac a body and people, I'm going to introduce myself. France with, I was there. Aros I'm not or 18g of ganrif. In fact, I'm going to paint it. not in anhygoel, I was thinking, o In Aml number o GANRIF I'm not a man. The French obvious Fell I London and the United Kingdom A little bit Hollow year Other ar not Ddeg body - I know. the satellite, Sateau police French wine, Language The Troie building I'm getting better. We can. share Felly, John, please. of Duntfield Many Ilan Some Maybe you can. Holbein Henry. The Palace Whitehall, Unused - I'm not going to. whole Un o about Ghi I think And Holbein was afraid to ask me to take a picture of Henry. I'm not a photographer, but I'm a very important person. I'm not going to go into detail. I'm sorry about that. I may also choose a hat or a sky. And it was quite fashionable for people to wear hat badges of various types in the But that little badge of a The skull perhaps gives us a clue to something that was of particular interest to Jean de Dinteville, as we shall see. Now Dinteville was a very learned, educated man. He was the youngest son of the king. He was a little while before he became an ambassador. But there was another A messenger who came to London in 1553 and this is the man on the right, Georges de Selve. Now as is the case with Jean, his friend, we have a clue as to his age, which is So again, these are two young men in their 20s, Georges He was not quite 25 yet, but he had already been made Bishop of Lavaux. too young to be consecrated and to wear the bishop's robes, which is one reason why He may be portrayed wearing this absolutely sumptuous fur-lined robe. The outer face of the fur, but it must go all the way under the And the robe itself is made of this rather beautiful brownish-purple silk damask And the size of that pattern is a good indication So although it might look at first glance quite sober dress, I'm not sure what you're talking about, but I'm not sure what you're talking about. We have some clues because there are a couple of letters in which Jean de Dinteville mentions He may have been in London as early as mid-April, but we know by early June he'd Jean says how wonderful it's been to have his friend It's really cheered him up, but the motive for the visit seems to be that he's not going to be able to make it. It was probably bringing another message from France to the We know, however, that Georges was a man of great courage and courage. was very concerned with the breakdown of Christendom, with the split in Christianity between the Lutherans and the Catholic Church, and he would have been very concerned by Henry's Now, the fact that we can narrow down the months for this visit to really The space of about a month and a half means that we can also home in on when this painting It must have been conceived during those In the spring months when Georges de Selve visited London and Jean de Dinteville decided that Maybe he was thinking of a picture of the two of them. Commissioning something much less elaborate from Holbein himself, but Georges' visit must have crystallized the idea of this double portrait of the two friends together. What we don't know is how Holbein made this portrait. Portraits normally Holbein would make a drawing of his sitter, and actually we have a large There are about 80 of them, most of them still in existence. The Royal Collection, and in a number of cases we can match the drawing of the We can only assume that Holbein made drawings of Jean and Georges while he was here so briefly, as well as perhaps as studies for the objects Georges' face is perhaps not as animated as the one in the painting. Maybe he didn't actually paint the picture. We just don't know, and we don't know how long Holbein took to get to the hospital. If he started planning it, say, in April or May, he might have spent He painted a number of other works in 1533. There are some suggestions that he may have been working pretty quickly on There are certainly a couple of instances where we can point to So, for example, if we look at the way this Beautiful oriental carpet is painted, if you look that close you'll see he's depicted the tufts of the carpet quite literally using a rather thick brush and dabbing with the ends of the brush there to give the effects of the tufts, and between the tufts you can Now, that might be the substrate of the carpet on which the So we know that Holbein started with the idea of making a picture of the world. off with this large panel made up of a number of oak planks and he covered it with quite So when he came to paint the carpet he already had something to work on And again, with that green curtain in the background, if you look rather closely at the pattern in the background of it, and It's all painted quite economically, there aren't many layers there, he's laid out the And then he made the folds over the top, so the pattern is actually quite a flat pattern laid out first of all, and then he's rather cleverly introduced the idea of the folds of the curtain, which I think is quite convincing, but again it's a sign that He was probably being very economical in the way that he approached this. wonders what these objects are doing in the picture, you're probably wondering the same So I need to tell you a little bit about the objects on the top shelf and the objects on the lower shelf, and then we'll speculate a little bit about what they're The objects on the top shelf are all, if you like, to do with celestial bodies, and the objects on the lower shelf might be seen to have something to do with the earth, and you certainly have a globe of the heavens right up there, Now, there's a whole medley of instruments on that top shelf which were used for telling the time, using the sun's rays, locating the sun and other heavenly bodies when you wanted to work out the time of day, Or obviously if you were someone at sea you would want to work out your location So there are a lot of different types of instruments We know that Jean de Dinteville was quite interested in instruments of this kind. In his letters there is a reference to an oval compass, which is probably an instrument We don't know if he owned any of these The Commission has not yet received any information on the The painting was by a man named Nikolaus Kratzer, who was a German and who was the astronomer He was a friend of Holbein, who painted his portrait in 1528. and interestingly it includes several of these instruments, the paintings in this painting. You can see it there or you can look it up online, and if you compare it with this So they may or may not be exactly the same as the objects in the picture. The same objects, but they seem to be variations on a theme, and we can speculate that Nikolaus Kratzer may have been involved in the conversations between Jean de Dinteville and Holbein about What to represent here. So next to the Sphere of the Heavens, showing a number of the constellations, you've got You could hold it up with its string, you'd have to Mysteriously, this doesn't seem to be outside, but there are shadows reflected here, and then it would give you an idea of the time of day. You needed to know which month was being referred to. Here, one is April, which would fit quite well with what we know about Georges de Selve's When you actually start trying to lock down what these The instruments might be saying about dates and about times, actually you get into quite a With this polyhedral dial there, with a little compass on top, It's actually set for different times, not radically different, but different times in So it's obviously not meant to show anything accurate. When you look at these quadrants up here, there are various inaccuracies about the way On the right-hand side here is a a very elaborate instrument called a torquatum, and we know that Nikolaus Kratzer, the astronomer, He was interested in these instruments, and he may have tried to build one. The European Parliament has a duty to ensure that the European Parliament is able to take part in the debate on the draft budget. and English courts would have been interested in these instruments, which go back to ancient Greek astronomy, and in the Renaissance people were very interested in trying to recreate and how they might be used, again in relation to the position of the celestial bodies, telling you the time in more elaborate ways. Now some people have theorized and speculated that there are a lot of hidden meanings here I'm not convinced that's absolutely I think what is more interesting is the disparity and the inaccuracies here The time is the time that is intended to be shown deliberately out of joint, for example. I think that the Commission's proposals are very important. There may also be a bit of a division between left and right in the painting The Commission has not yet adopted a proposal for a directive on the approximation of the laws of the Member States relating to the labelling of foodstuffs. The world is not a shelf, because this globe, which is placed right next to Jean de Dinteville, is not a shelf. Just tell us that Europe is there when it's upside down, but it is there, and England And Ireland at the bottom because it's upside down. Paris is located, but also located really pretty much in prime position in the middle is Jean de Dinteville's own chateau of policy, so that's very very clearly spelled out and He's saying I think, you know, that's what I own, that's where I usually live, so I don't There's a very interesting aspect to this. I'm not sure how to describe the way Holbein has portrayed some of these names. Not with a P but with a B, Barris, and that's perhaps a clue to the way that Holbein spoke One of the mysteries is how well Holbein actually spoke English and how he and Jean I think that's going to remain a mystery. Right side here near Georges Desselves is a hymnal and what's interesting is This is a Lutheran hymnal, so it shows you two pages with hymns in the German language. It's a Lutheran hymnal and that may be a deliberate reference to Georges Desselves' In 1529 it seems that he was the first to had actually spoken at one of the European meetings, the Diets, called by the Emperor Charles V to address this issue of the split and his speech was later published and in He pleads for the Christians to come together once again. What's particularly interesting about it is that it looks like a very accurate The first is the rendering of a book and in many ways it is but when you compare it to the original on You find that those two hymns are not in those consecutive places They've been deliberately placed, deliberately chosen from different places in that hymnal and they're put together and one of them says come Holy Ghost So that's maybe a bit of a plea for reconciliation and the other is Luther's rendering of the Ten Commandments which was something after all that both the Lutherans, the Protestants So maybe that's what it's doing there. I think Holbein is showing this beautiful rendering of a lute in perspective. Here as with his beautiful rendering of Danfield's Clothes that he can do something quite difficult One of the things that may not be completely obvious But until you get close to the lute, there's something wrong. If you look at the edge of the lute right there you might be able to just see That curving broken string like a single hair at the edge of the lute. That one string is broken and maybe that too has a meaning. A case of flutes here, born musical instruments, but one of them it has been noted is missing. So is that again a reference to some lack of harmony? It's propped open with this set square there and there's a pair The first is the geometry of the earth. And the page that's been chosen here This is a very accurate rendering again of a page from a A German arithmetic book by someone named Peter Appian. It's about methods for division. We don't know for sure, but one thing I think we can be absolutely certain of and that is the presence of two more objects in this painting which And by that I mean this object here and the This object puzzled people for many, many years. In the 19th century one of the curators working at the National Gallery who was quite a Holbein The expert was puzzled by it and concluded it was a fish bone, a seagull bone he thought. Well, it's bone, he was right about that and the painting wasn't in the perfect condition. So this is much more visible and if you stand to the right It's a distorted representation of the image. This is a technique that was known in the 16th century. Vinci was interested in it, and later books were published telling artists how to paint. If you go next door to the National Portrait In the gallery you will see an extraordinary portrait of the future King Edward VI distorted in its original frame and that's interesting because that frame has on one side a space This is a kind of telescopic viewing device so we know how that painting was viewed. This is not the original frame of this picture, this was made for it at the National Gallery And we don't have any information on how this skull could have been viewed. You may have been asked to step away and view it from this side or you may have been presented with a little glass cylinder and if you step back from the painting and look directly If you were to use the glass cylinder again, the skull would snap into its correct perspective. producing this convincing image of a skull that moves when we move and has been distorted In this extraordinary way is a great feat for an artist and we don't know exactly how Some of the instruction books would tell you how to square a drawing We don't know if that's the method Holbein followed or whether he may have used some more sophisticated method, perhaps illuminating a drawing and throwing a shadow on a wall is one suggestion. a tour de force and of course it may just relate to that little skull hat badge that We saw at the beginning of Dunteville's own emblem and own interest in this. One place in Holbein's work where we can find an image of a skull with two full-length figures on either side and it's the very last woodcut in Holbein's famous series of the Dance of So Holbein may have gotten the idea from that We can imagine him showing Jean de Dunteville his idea for that. There were many paintings in this period in which people wanted to be shown with a skull as A reminder of the fate that befalls everyone and if you're proud enough of your appearance It was often good to have that reminder, well you're not around. You don't want to be accused of being too vain so the skull might be included. But Holbein, of course, went much further. Sometimes you get skulls on the backs of paintings. It's an extraordinary feat, and I think we're meant to be to relate it to what we can see upper left and I think it's deliberately partially hidden It's a silver crucifix seen from the side and for Christians that was of course Again, something that united all Christians at this So I think in experiencing this painting you were meant to go from experiencing the time A sense of mortality that befalls everyone no matter how magnificently dressed or well But then there is the hope of salvation and ultimate salvation. So I think in a way it's very difficult to I think he's added a sense of an extra dimension. It's more like the words to Horatio, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in And I think in a way that's what Holbein shows us here in paint. You, too.