Holbein's famous life-size double portrait 'The Ambassadors' is one of the best known of his surviving works. Yet the subject matter has always presented intriguing problems. Who precisely were the two ambassadors of the title? Why did they choose to be painted together - with an array of globes, astronomical and musical instruments, books and other objects placed on shelves between them, a skull concealed in the foreground of the painting, and a crucifix partially hidden behind a curtain? The recent careful cleaning and restoration of 'The Ambassadors' has enabled an art historian, conservator, and scientist at the National Gallery in London to collaborate on a thorough study of the making and meaning of this painting.

Anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within, sixteenth-century northern Europeans increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Examining the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europe's changing identity, Jennifer Nelson reveals the ways in which these early modern thinkers and artists grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine. Focusing on northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, this book proposes a complementary account of a Renaissance and Reformation for which epistemology is not so much destabilized as pluralized. Addressing a wide range of media-including paintings, etchings and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes-Nelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbein's famously complex double portrait The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthon's measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmann's modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus's eclectic Adages, Disharmony of the Spheres is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts. Carefully researched and engagingly written, Disharmony of the Spheres will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.

The Ambassadors--the famous portrait of two diplomats visiting Henry VIII's court in London 1533--has long been celebrated by art historians. Traditionally the painting has been seen as representing the political and religious unrest of its day. Now, historian John North, author of Stonehenge: A New Interpretation of Prehistoric Man and the Cosmos, once again uses his investigative skills to reinterpret history. In this radical reinterpretation of the painting John North shows that the work has a very different and previously undetected, central theme. Far from being random, the objects are very deliberately placed. Part international riddle, part art history, and part French history, the book opens a remarkable window on the world of the Renaissance.

This is the first comprehensive monograph on Hans Holbein the Younger to have appeared in over 40 years. The authors re-examine every aspect of a remarkable career and cast fresh light on many hitherto vexing questions and misunderstandings.

Stunning portraits by the renowned Renaissance artist illuminate fascinating figures from the European merchant class, intellectual elite, and court of King Henry VIII. Nobles, ladies, scholars, and merchants were the subjects of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543), an inventive German artist best known for his dazzling portraits. Holbein developed his signature style in Basel and London amid a rich culture of erudition, self-definition, and love of luxury and wit before becoming court painter to Henry VIII. Accompanying the first major Holbein exhibition in the United States, this catalogue explores his vibrant visual and intellectual approach to personal identity. In addition to reproducing many of the artist's painted and drawn portraits, this volume delves into his relationship with leading intellectuals, such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Thomas More, as well as his contributions to publishing and book culture, meticulous inscriptions, and ingenious designs for jewels, hat badges, and other exquisite objects. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from October 19, 2021, to January 9, 2022 and at the Morgan Library & Museum from February 11 to May 15, 2022.