Dear All, Nicola Severino's article on the Holbein painting, The Ambassadors, is most interesting and adds to the corpus of understanding of this fascinating picture.
For those who read English but not Italian, there are many references to The Ambassadors, including BSS articles which Nicola refers to. An account that I particularly enjoyed is in the book `The Secret Life of Paintings' by Richard Foster and Pamela Tudor-Craig, where the painting is the subject of Chapter 6. Those who are not familiar with this work should first appreciate just how big the painting is. The figures are life size. This explains how all the detail can be accommodated. There are so many incredible things about the details in the picture. For example, the globe shown on the lower shelf is the first known representation of a terrestrial globe in a painting. Moreover it emphasises the so-called (but not-yet-discovered) North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The little book in front of the globe can be identified as an arithmetic primer of the day. Even the page can be inferred. The polyhedral dial clearly shows polar oriented gnomons, quite a novelty in 1533. Intriguingly, and deliberately, one dial shows 09:30 and another 10:30. One detail which Foster and Tudor-Craig draw attention to is the declination indicated by the Shepherd's Dial. This corresponds to a date of 11 April or 15 August (remember that the Julian Calendar was in operation) but there is good reason to believe the April date is intended. Why is this significant? Here, it seems, we can reconstruct a 16th Century news flash. Recall that the painting is dated 1533. The indicated date, 11 April, was a Friday. Moreover it was Good Friday and it had been quite a week... On Monday 7 April, the English Parliament decreed that henceforth there should be no appeal to the Court of Rome. [Interestingly, Nicola doesn't mention this!!] Why so? Well, this was the culmination of `The King's Great Matter', Henry VIII's desire to extricate himself from his marriage to Catharine of Aragon. In fact, Henry had secretly (and bigamously) married Anne Boleyn in February and she was now four months pregnant. The Great Matter was daily becoming greater and Henry set 11 April 1533 as the deadline for resolving it, and there is the date, in the painting, on a sundial. Amazing! Many apologies to readers who are familiar with all this! Frank H. King Cambridge, U.K. -
