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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ambassadors_%28Holbein%29
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"Its title is misleading because the picture arose not from a dual embassy but from a six-week visit paid by Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavour, to his friend Dinteville, the French ambassador in London, in the spring of 1533. Dinteville himself arrived in london in the first week of February and returned to France, his mission accomplished, in November, and a year later De selve became French ambassador in Venice. De Selve's appointment cannot have been anticipated when he was in England, and there is no case therefore for supposing that the picture (like the diptych which Erasmus presented to Sir Thomas More) was an attempt to compensate physical divorce by pictural propinquity. Visually it consists of two psychologically discrete portraits which are united in a single emblematic scheme.
Though Dinteville's mission lasted a mere nine months, it was fraught with drama. A few weeks before he landed, the King was secretly married to Anne Boleyn, and Pope, Clement VII, was threatening excommunication. In May his marriage with Catherine of aragon was pronaunced void by Cranmer, and Anne Boleyn was crowned Queen. Dinteville's brother, the Bishop of Auxerre, was French ambassador at the Vatican, and negotitations were in progress for the betrothal of the Duke of Orleans, the second son of Francis I of France, to the Pope's niece. On the English side it was understood that the price which the Papacy paid for this alliance would be a more accommodating attitude toward the English royal marriage. But events developed otherwise, and a bilateral agreement was reached between France and the Papacy whereby the Pope secretly recognised the French claim to Milan and French religious policy developed in a militantly anti-Lutheran sense. Dinteville's last official task in London was to report the english king's resentment what had taken place.
In the equation of the ambassadors one term is unexplained, precisely why it was that Georges de Selve visited London. His visit was secret and official, official in that it was personally authorised by the King of France, secret in that news of it was to be kept from Montmorency, the leader of the French clerical extremists. Dinteville and De Selve had in common that both belonged to the party of moderate reformers. Entrusted with the upbringing of the Duke of Angouleme, Dinteville seems to have recommended the appointment as his tutor of Lefevre, the author of the first complete translation of the Bible into French and an associate of the crypto-Lutheran Roussel. Similarly De Selve, acting as ambassador to Charles V in 1529, delivered at the Diet of Speyer views of a notably latitudinarian tendency. It is likely, therefore, that their conjunction in the painting is due to their involment in the great religious crisis of their time and not to their common profession of diplomacy. That is corroborated by the emblatic content of the painting. Between the two figures is the symbol of discord, a lute with a broken string, beneath it is a German hymnbook, containing the first eight lines of Luther's translation of the Veni Creator Spiritus, and opposite it are the opening words of Luther's Ten Commandments, while the feet of both figures are firmly planted on a Cosmati mosaic pavement, which all contemporaries would have recognised as that of the sanctuary of Westminster Abbey. It cannot be established how the geometrical instruments above (some of them also occur in Holbein's earlier portrait of the astronomer Kratzer), the copy of Apian's Newe und Wolhgegrundete Unterweisung alle Kauffmanns Rechnung or the anamorphic skull in the center are related to this scheme, but the fact that the curtain is drawn back on the left to reveal a crucifix leaves the religious connotation of the painting in no doubt. It could well be regarded as a solemn manifesto of compromise. A program on these lines would have been no less congenial to Holbein than to the men whom he potrayed, for in 1530, three years before the Ambassadors was painted, the reform movement reached Basel, and guild members, Holbein among them, were pressed to suscribe to the new faith. Sympathetic as he was toward reform, and hostile to the Papacy as we know him to have been, Holbein refused to communicate by the new rite until a satisfactory explanation of its nature was supplied.
When Dinteville returned to France, his personal position and that of his family appeared secure. But within four years they were meanced by the jealousy of the Duchesse d'Etampes, and in 1539 three of the four brothers, excluding Jean de Dinteville but including the seemingly impregnable Bishop of Auxerre, were forced to flee from France. By 1537 the cloud on the horizon was already visible, and in that year there was comissioned a companion piece to the ambassadors. The artist is unidentified - he was probably a Fleming; the attribution to Felix Chretien is conjectural - but the subject is reasonably plain. It shows Jean de Dinteville in the center, as Moses, pointing to his brother the Bishop of Auxerre, as Aaron, before the seated figure of Pharaon, whose features have more than a chance resemblance to those of Francis I. At the back, identified by inscriptions, are two younger brothers, Guillaume and Gaucher de Dinteville. The story of aaron, the just priest, is presented as a parable of the career of Francois de Dinteville, who was threatened with expulsion from his diocese. Two inscriptions reinforce this point. One is from Genesis, "And Abraham believed in the Lord and he counted it to him for his righteousness", while the other is the motto of the Dinteville family, "Fortune the companion of merit." The painting is by no means a great work of art, but its space structure depends from the Ambassadors, and its politico-religious symbolism offers an indication of the lines on which the ambassadors should be interpreted."
John Pope-Hennessy, The Portrait in the Renaissance
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