Holbein's extraordinary 'Ambassadors' | National Gallery

well good afternoon everybody welcome to the National Gallery and to this talk on hormones ambassadors I'm Susan Foster I'm director of public engagement and also the curator here who's lucky enough to have whole Bynes masterpiece under her care so I'm going to spend the next 30 minutes or so talking about this very extraordinary painting but I don't think I'm going to be able to provide all of the answers and of course I'll be very happy to try to answer any questions that you may have afterwards so this is a painting that the National Gallery acquired back in 1890 it looked a bit different then the background that green curtain had been painted out it was it was very dark other bits were not in such clear condition as they are now and nobody knew who the two people here were the painting had been in England for most of the 19th century and in 1890 it was in the collection of the Earl's of Radner at Longford castle and they still owned the wonderful portrait of Erasmus over on the wall just next to you there which is on loan to the National Gallery they still have a wonderful collection of Longford and if you're interested in it and its history and how you can buy tickets to visit it then do have a look on the National Gallery website because all the information is there so in 1890 we were able to raise enough money with some very generous gifts to acquire this painting and opinions differed as to who these two men might be some people thought that they might be English the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt was one hopeful suggestion it was thought they might be two young Germans but nobody at the time thought that they might actually be two Frenchmen as we now know they are and it wasn't until nineteen when the art historian Mary Harvey published her wonderful book on Hall binds and ambassadors which is still a wonderful book and I commend it to you that the fruits of her research were revealed she was able to show the paintings history and through collections in France and trace it back to the family of this man Jean der Donck feel about whom I'll say more in just a moment but let's first of all come to the artist Hans Holbein the younger the one thing that wasn't in doubt when this painting was acquired for the National Gallery was the artist the famous hands Holbein and you can see here or you may want to come up afterwards and look very closely at the painting too to see it it's a little bit of a gluey patch but it's definitely there Holbein signature in latin saying that Holbein painted this picture or was painting this picture in 1533 and it's an unusually long and elaborate signature for Holbein he doesn't always sign his paintings and when he does it's often a lot briefer than that and I take from that but Holbein thought this was a pretty important picture to give his name to and it is a most extraordinary picture in his work as a whole now Holbein as you may know was born in Germany spent a number of years working in Basel in Switzerland and then first came to England in 1526 and his basel patron the humanist Erasmus had recommended him to a number of notable people in England including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Sir Thomas More he stayed in England for a couple of years during that time he worked for Henry the eighth's at the Palace of Greenwich painting some spectacular paintings for a temporary entertainment tent and then he came back again and we know he was back by 1532 and then in 1533 he paints this extraordinary picture and by this time he was probably back in full view of Henry the eighth's and almost certainly carrying out some work for him so his fame was already well established in England but he had never before tried a large life-size life scale portrait of two people at full length he was not the first artist in history to have made a full-length double portrait like this of two men therein examples we can trace back into the 15th century but hope I've had never done anything like this before it must have caused quite a stir in London but it seems likely that the painting didn't hang around and that this man John didn't feel for whom it was painted took it back to France with him where it stayed until the end of the 18th century really pretty much hidden from view and that in itself has an extraordinary story I think of such a remarkable painting and yet mostly hidden from view for several centuries of its history now Jean der Donck field was a remarkable young ambassador he was sent as French ambassador to London five times in all and in 1533 he was on his second tour of duty and he was pretty reluctant to be here he wanted to be back home in France he had a beautiful chateau the Chateau of policy in burgundy joe.southin of Tor and he was rebuilding it he was improving it he had lots of ideas and fortunately for us he left a good deal of Correspondence so we can trace this 1533 tour of duty and what he felt about it unfortunately what he doesn't mention in any of that correspondence is Holbein his relationship with the artist and the painting of this picture we would love to know more about that but I think we can only speculate so Jean de Tocqueville came to London in 1533 at the beginning of the year and was lodged in Bridewell Palace which is on the east side of the City of London and it's where the ambassador's were normally put he was ill for much of the time it seems that he had something very similar to malaria so he was constantly ill it wasn't just a cold or flu though he did complain about the English whether he had to stay in England because 1533 was a really momentous year Henry the eighth's had managed to divorce Catherine of Aragon and was going to marry Anne Boleyn in May 15:33 and of course this situation this political situation the break with Rome was causing tremendous trouble and disquiet in Europe and it was something that John's master Frances the first of France was very concerned about so it was a pretty serious year to be the French ambassador in London so he was expecting to stay for the marriage the coronation in June and then he found he had to stay longer because Anne was pregnant with Henry's heir at that time of course he hoped it was going to be a boy and it turned out in September to be Queen Elizabeth the first but that meant that John had to stay on even longer for the birth and Francis was going to be Godfather to that child so he was in London for the long haul then he was miserable he was ill he wanted to go back to sunny France and he somehow had to keep himself occupied he had spent a lot of money as well he complained about that a lot when he had to attend the coronation he had to kit himself and his followers out in new outfits and he had to hold a banquet and pay for it so he did have these diplomatic tasks but the prospect of commissioning Holbein to paint this wonderful portrait must have really kept his spirits up for quite a long period we don't know how long whole line took to paint this picture but there must have been as I hope show you an awful lot of thought that went into it a lot of conversations with Zhang between John and Holbein that we can only now really imagine now John makes a big impression here and I think part of that is through what he is wearing these wonderful pink and black clothes he's very fashionable clothes that hole by depicts him in and this painting is not just Holbein showing off his compositional abilities his abilities as a portraitist but also his ability to render these wonderful textures of fabric that extraordinary pink satin sleeve this Lynx fur I mean Lynx was a very very expensive fur with these long hairs and when you get to the edges of where the fur overlaps say the curtain you can see Holbein picking out the individual long hairs so you you get the sense of the deep texture of that fur then there are lots of little details for example the way in which the slashings of the sleeve there are held together with these tiny little gold tags and then this wonderful gold dagger in its scabbard which gives us one of the clue in this painting to the identity of Jean because there's a number here which relates to his age it tells us that he's in his 29th year so he's 28 and hanging from the dagger is this absolutely beautiful representation of an enormous tassel it's blue and gold and the way in which Holbein has represented particularly the gold thread of that tassel is in complete contrast in this rather free way in which he's painted the pink satin or the fur of the Lynx it's immensely detailed and he's used a technique in which he would have painted out the areas where the gold was going to fall with glue and then he would have put gold leaf on top of the glue and it would have stuck to where the areas where the glue was and then been brushed away from the other areas and you're left with this extraordinarily beautiful detailing of the tassel using real gold leaf do come up and look at it very closely afterwards it really repays a lot of close study or go on our website and you'll see not just the usual zooming images but a link to a google image of this painting which is something quite extraordinary and if you zoom into that you will see details that it is really almost impossible to see with the naked eye even if you get very very closely to the painting so I recommend looking at the Google image of this painting all the information that we have about this picture is it's there so Shonda don't feel is shown standing at full length and he's pretty broad as well in some ways this representation and even this double portrait is a dress rehearsal for whole bynes representation of Henry the 8th at Whitehall palace a painting that he may in 1537 but which doesn't survive it was burnt down when the palace burnt down at the end of the 17th century but we do have records of it including Hall binds original cartoon for the left hand side which is on view next door at the National Portrait Gallery and again you see this full-length figure very very broad with these broad shoulders these padded puffed shoulders so you know perhaps Henry the eighth's even saw this painting or perhaps a drawing a sketch of it and and Holbein was then commissioned to make that image of Henry it's it's just a thought but this is a very impressive image of a man another rather extraordinary detail is up there on his hat now there are gold decorations there there is also a little hat badge of a skull and it was quite fashionable for people to wear hat badges of various types apps in the 16th century and at the Tudor Court and the French Court but that little badge of a skull perhaps gives us a clue to something that was of particular interest to Jean to don't feel as we'll see now don't feel was a very erudite educated man he was an important and trusted figure at the court of King Francis the first of France he had the care of the King's youngest son a little while before he became an ambassador so he would certainly have been trusted to convey messages from the King of France to the King of England but there was another messenger who came to London in 1553 and this is the man on the right George to self now as is the case with Jean his friend we've got a clue as to his age which is just on the edge of the book there so again these are two young men in their 20s George not yet quite 25 but he had already been made Bishop of love or but he was actually too young to be consecrated and to wear the bishops robes which is one reason why he may be portrayed instead we're in this absolutely sumptuous fur-lined robe you can see here the outer facing of the fur but it must go all the way underneath the robe and the robe itself is made of this rather beautiful brownie purpley silk damask with this very very large pattern on it and the size of that pattern is a good indication as to the expense of this fabric so although it might look at first sight quite sober dress it's very very expensive dress now what was George - self doing in London well we have some clues because there are a couple of letters in which John de domville mentions his visit he may have been in London as early as mid-april but we know by early June he'd gone so it wasn't a long visit Jean says how wonderful it's been to have his friend George on this visit it's really cheered him up but the motive for the visit seems to have been kept secret it was probably bringing another message from France's to Henry the eighth's but we may never know exactly what message we do know though that George was very concerned with the breakup of Christendom with the split in Christianity between the Lutheran's and the Catholic Church and he would have been very concerned by Henry's break with Rome 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 homed in on when this painting must have been conceived with Holbein it must surely have been conceived during those spring months when George - self visited London and Jean didn't feel decided that there should be a portrait which included them both perhaps he had been thinking of commissioning something much less elaborate from Holbein himself but George's visit must have crystallized the idea of this double portrait of the two friends together what we don't know is how hope I went about making this portrait we do know that for portraits normally Holbein would make a drawing of his sitter and actually we have a large number of those drawings about 80 or so of them they still survive most of them in the Royal Collection and in a number of cases we can match up the drawing of the sitter with the painted portrait we can only assume that Holbein made drawings of Jean and of George while he was here so briefly as well perhaps all as studies for the objects in the painting but no drawings survived George's faces perhaps not as animated as some of those that Holbein was painted around painting around this time maybe he didn't actually have very long with him we just don't know and we don't know how long hope I took to paint this picture if he started planning it say in April or May he might have spent some months painting it but he did paint a number of other works in 1533 we don't know there are some suggestions that he might have been working quite quickly at times on this picture there are certainly a couple of instances where he we can point to him taking what might seem to be shortcuts so for example if we look at the way this beautiful oriental carpet is painted if you look at that closely 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 see a dark gray background now that might be the substrate of the carpet on which the Tufts are woven but it is also the ground of the painting so we know that Holbein started off with this large panel made up of a number of oak planks and he covered it with quite a dark grey ground so when he came to paint the carpet he already had something to work with and that suggests he was working quite quickly 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 it's all painted quite economically there aren't sort of many layers there he's laid out the pattern and then he's 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 you know is quite convincing but again it's a sign that he was perhaps being very economical in the way that he approached this now everybody wonders what these objects are doing in the picture you're probably wondering the same thing 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 doing in the picture the objects on the top shelf are all if you like to do with heavenly bodies and the objects on the lower shelf might be seen to have something to do with the earth and you've certainly got a globe of the heavens right on the top there and you've got a globe of the earth down there now there's a whole medley of instruments on that top shelf which were used for telling the time using the Rays of the Sun locating the Sun and other heavenly bodies when you were wanting to work out the time of the day or obviously if you or somebody at sea you would be wanting to work out your location from the positions of the heavenly bodies so there are lots of different types of instrument here we know that Shonda donc fier was quite interested in instruments of this kind in his letters there's a reference to an oval compass which is probably an instrument rather along the lines of one of those depicted here we don't know if he owned any of these instruments but somebody else who may have been involved in the discussions around this painting was a man called Nicholas Kratzer who was a German and who was the astronomer to King Henry the eighth and he was a friend of Holbein Holbein painted his portrait in 1528 and interestingly it includes several of these instruments the paintings in the Louvre you can see it there or you can look for it online and if you compare it with this painting you will see the similarities between the objects so they may or may not be exactly the same objects but they seem to be variations on a theme and we can speculate that Nicholas Kratzer may have been involved in the con sessions between Jean to Danville and Holbein about what to represent here so next to the sphere of the heavens showing a number of the constellations you've got a little cylindrical dial there that you could hold it up with its string you'd have to be outside where the Sun was shining mysteriously this appears not to be outside but there are shadows reflected here and then it would give you an idea of the time of the day you needed to know which month was being referred to there are two possibilities here one is April which would fit in quite well with what we know about George des selves visit and another would be August when you actually start to try to lock down what these instruments might be saying about dates and about times actually you get into quite a lot of difficulty with this polyhedral dial there with a little compass on the top it's actually set four different times not radically different but different times in a morning 9:30 10:30 for example so it's not evidently meant to show anything accurate when you look at these quadrants up here there are various inaccuracies about the way in which they're represented a few unexpected features on the right hand side here is a very elaborate instrument called a talk waiter and we know that Nicholas Kratzer the astronomer was interested in these instruments and he may have tried to build one this is a wooden instrument like like the others and he may perhaps have had one certainly people at the French 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 them and in what and how they might be used again in relation to the position of the heavenly is telling you the time in more elaborate ways now some people have theorized and speculated that there are a lot of hidden meanings here and that one can be very precise about dates and times I'm not convinced that's absolutely the case at all I think what is more interesting is the disparity and the inaccuracies here are for example the times meant to be shown deliberately out of joint for example certainly what was going on in Europe at this time and in London was very concerning now I think there may also be intended to be a bit of a division between left and right in the painting as far as the objects are concerned in particular related to two of the objects on the lower shelf because this earthly globe which is placed right next to John didn't feel doesn't just tell us that Europe is there when it's upside down but but it is there and England and Ireland at the lower part because it's upside-down it shows us France sure enough Paris is located but also located really pretty much in prime position in the middle is jean de donk feels own chateau of policy so that's very very clearly spelt out and he's saying I think you know that's what I own that's where I live usually so I don't think think it's accidental that it's right next to him there is a very interesting aspect though to the way that whole bind has portrayed some of these names Paris is there spelt not with a P but with a B Barris and that's perhaps a clue to the way that Holbein spoke French one of the mysteries is how well Holbein actually spoke English and how he and Jean de domville actually communicated I think that's going to remain mysterious on the right hand side here near to George to self is a hymnbook and what's interesting is this is a Lutheran hymn book so it shows you two pages with hymns in the German language it's a Lutheran hymn book and that may be a deliberate reference to George ourselves interest in trying to bring together this split in Christendom in 1529 it seems he have 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 it he pleads for the Christians to come together once more so this perhaps may be a reference to that what's particularly interesting about it is that it looks like a very accurate rendering of a book and in many ways it is but when you compare it to the original on which it's based you find that those two hymns are not in those consecutive places in the hymn book they've been deliberately placed deliberately chosen from different places in that hymn book and they're put together and one of them says come Holy Ghost so that maybe is 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 Lutheran's the Protestants and the Catholics still had in common so maybe that's what it's doing there above it is this beautiful rendering of a lute in perspective I think Holbein is showing here as with his beautiful rendering of Daniels clothes that he can do something quite difficult to show this loot in foreshortening one of the things that may not be completely obvious until you come close to the loot though is that there's something wrong one of the strings has broken if you look at the edge of the loop just there you may be able to just see that curving broken string like a single hair at the edge of the lute so this lute is not in perfect harmony what that's one string is broken and perhaps that too has a meaning there's a case of flutes here bore musical instruments but one of them it's been noted is missing so is that again a reference to some lack of harmony we don't know over on this side is an arithmetic book it's propped open with this set square there and there's a pair of dividers behind so measuring and geometry is very much to the fore here earthly measurement as opposed to the celestial measurement on top and the page that's being chosen here in this book is interesting this is a very accurate rendering again of a page from a German arithmetic book by somebody called Peter Appian and the page here is all about division it's about methods for division again is this a reference to the division in Christendom at this time 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 take it into a completely different dimension and by that I mean this object here and the semi hidden object top left there this object puzzled people for many many years in the nineteenth century one of the curators working at the National Gallery who was quite a whole buying expert puzzled over it and concluded it was a fishbone a cuttlefish bone he thought well it his bone he was right about that and the painting wasn't in the excellent condition that it's in now today so this is much more visible and if you stand to the right-hand side of the painting it suddenly snaps into perspective it's a distorted representation of a human skull this is a technique that was known in the 16th century Lonardo da Vinci was interested in it later on there were books published telling artists how to make these distorted representations if you go next door to the National Portrait Gallery you'll see an extraordinary portrait of the future King Edward the sixth distorted in its original frame and that's interesting because that frame has at one side a space for a sort 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 might have been viewed so you might have been asked to step away and view it from this side or you might have been presented with a little glass cylinder and if you stepped back from the painting and looked directly at it using the glass cylinder again the skull would snap into it's correct perspective undoubtedly producing this convincing image of a skull which 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 Holbein did it some of the instruction books would tell you how to square up a drawing and then copy it square by square we don't know whether 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 war is one suggestion but it is extraordinarily convincing it's a tour de force and of course it may just relate to that little skull hat badge that we saw at the beginning of Danville's own emblem and own interest in this now there's one place in whole Bynes 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 whole Bynes famous series of the dance of death in which death is triumphant finally so hope I may have got the idea from that composition we can perhaps imagine him showing Shonda donfield his idea for that and there were many paintings in this period in which people wanted to be shown with a skull as a remem as a reminder of the fate that befall z-- everybody and if you're proud enough of your appearance to have yourself painted it was often good to have that reminder well you're not around forever you don't want to be accused of being perhaps too vain so the skull might be included in that way but Holbein of course has gone much further he has hidden this reference to a skull sometimes you get skulls on the backs of paintings he has hidden this on the front of his painting in Clearview it's an extraordinary feat and I think we're meant to relate it to what we can see top left and I think it's deliberately partly concealed there it's a silver crucifix seen from the side and for Christians that of course was a reference to the hope of salvation again something that United all Christians at this time so I think in experiencing this painting you were meant to go from experiencing the sense of mortality that the Falls everybody no matter how magnificent dressed or well-educated it comes to everybody but then there is the hope of salvation and ultimate resurrection according to the Christian doctrine so I think in a way it's very difficult to sum up what Holbein is doing here but I think he has added a sense of an extra dimension to a portrait of these two young men and these extraordinary objects it's rather like the famous quote from Hamlet I may get this slightly wrong but I think it's Hamlet who says to Horatio there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and I think in a way that's what Holbein shows us here in paint thank you you

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Views: 192,656

Rating: 4.9076586 out of 5

Keywords: Hans Holbein the Younger, Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, Henry VIII, Christianity, Astronomy, Art history, History of art, Holbein, National Gallery, National Gallery London, London, Trafalgar Square

Id: paA8hqqQ-_w

Length: 38min 23sec (2303 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/purvel]

Interesting! Wikipedia has a 30kx29k pixel picture (!) of this if anyone wants to study the details she's talking about.

[u/[deleted]]

I’m excited for this. It was a topic on the BBC show In Our Time. I also thought but would be boring, but what information the tease out of the details is amazing.