look closer

From here, a stain; from one step to the right, a skull in perfect projection. The painting keeps both readings and lets the viewer commute.

The man on the left is Jean de Dinteville, French ambassador to London, 29 years old, and having the worst posting of his life. It is the spring of 1533 and England is coming apart from Rome in real time: the king has secretly married Anne Boleyn, who is visibly pregnant; the new archbishop is about to annul the old marriage on his own authority; France is trying to keep one boot in each camp. Dinteville's friend Georges de Selve, 25 and already a bishop, visited him in April, and Dinteville had Holbein, the best painter in England, put the two of them up full length on a single panel, surrounded by the complete equipment of their civilization. The equipment is the point, and it is out of tune. On the upper shelf sit the instruments of heaven, globes and sundials and a torquetum, several of them set to contradictory readings. On the lower shelf, the earthly instruments include a lute with one snapped string, the century's standard emblem of broken harmony, and beside it a Lutheran hymnbook lying open, in a painting of two Catholic diplomats, at the two hymns least likely to offend anyone: a plea to the Holy Ghost and the Ten Commandments. A textbook of merchants' arithmetic is propped open at the page beginning Division. Holbein has painted the entire crisis of Europe as a still life and dared the viewer to call it one. And across the floor, over the Cosmati pavement copied from Westminster Abbey, lies the famous impossibility: a pale smear a yard long that resolves, from one oblique step to the painting's right, into a perfect human skull, drawn in a projection so exact that opticians still argue about the tools. From the front, where the two brilliant young men look out, death is unreadable; find the angle, and the ambassadors go vague while the skull comes sharp. Dinteville's own motto was memento mori, and his cap badge, if you look, holds a tiny silver skull of its own. In the top left corner, half swallowed by the green curtain, hangs a silver crucifix: the one instrument in the picture nobody in it is using. Dinteville took the panel home to his château at Polisy that autumn and out of history for three and a half centuries. The National Gallery bought it in 1890, and it has spent the time since teaching visitors its one repeatable trick: walk left to right past the two men who owned everything, and watch what was waiting in the floor.