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Art Room 001
I would like to remind everybody that it is possible to view many world famous paintings at googleartproject.com in outstanding quality and detail.Let's look at "The Ambassadors" by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted in 1533. Here is how the page appears in your browser window when accessing the painting through the Google Art Project website (click on National Gallery London):
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Zooming in to see more detail - the following pictures are all screenshots from the Google Art Project pages. Click on the images to see them larger, or look at the painting yourself at the www.googleartproject.com:
Art Room 001:
Let's look at "The Ambassadors" by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted in 1533.
The painting is on display at the National Gallery in London. A good source of information about the painting is
The Restoration History of Holbein's "The Ambassadors"
written by Martin Wyld and available on the nationalgallery.org.uk website in PDF format (National Gallery Technical Bulletin Vol.19, pp 4-25).
To quote from the introduction:
"'The Ambassadors' is a full-length double portrait of two French diplomats, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, painted in London in 1533 (note 2). The two sitters are shown on either side of shelves laden with a variety of objects: globes of heaven and earth, astronomical devices, books and musical instruments. The two men stand on a floor inlaid with an elaborate geometrical design. The elongated image of a skull is painted across the lower part of the panel. The background is a green damask curtain, turned back at the top left corner to reveal a silver crucifix at the very edge of the panel. In the lower left corner in the shadowed part of the floor is the artist's signature in Latin: IOANNES HOLBEIN PINGEBAT and the date, 1533. The historian Mary Hervey solved many of the mysteries of the picture in her book published in 1900 (note 3)"
Zoom in to see more detail.