Painting of the Month

'The Ambassadors': Skull

This strange object is a skull, painted in distorted perspective known as an anamorphosis. It can best be seen standing at the right of the painting.

Many sixteenth-century European portraits include skulls as reminders of death. One contemporary noted 'people do cause their counterfeits to be made to see how time doth alter them…and to pray to God that as they do draw toward their end in this world, so they may be the more ready to die.'

Sometimes skulls were hidden on the back of pictures. Holbein cleverly concealed his skull on the front - a dramatic warning against faith in worldly achievement and wealth, depicted in the picture, instead of in the world to come, symbolised by the tiny crucifix in the top left-hand corner.

De Dinteville's skull hat badge must be similar to the 'little death's head' that the artist Albrecht Dürer bought in 1521.


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