Hi I'm tir ed d

I like to break down characters’ details and study them, so thought I should share this with y'all in case you want to learn how to draw them!!

ko-fi

Like so:

this is before and after the check cleared and my bills still had to get taken out, so now im just fucked for an entire other week, plus the 2 35 overdraft fees for the 2 seperate bills so ill be down to 280

youve seen it all before, im a trans girl with mental illness and just trying to survive and eat.

https://www.paypal.me/esics

please so much if you can help out, or even just spread this around, it would mean more than the world to me atm

Frodo like “I’m leaving without you to protect you”

And Merry and Pip (like me) saying nah fuck that

NO GOD NO

NO GOD NOT LIKE THIS NO

STOP FUCKING SHOOTING THE MAN BOROMIR DOESN’T DIE NO

NO STOP NO

I’m going to Mordor alone!

Of course you are!

And I’m coming with you!

what a fuckin ride

it has been remarked by some that a hobbit’s only real passion

is for food

a wizard is never late

THANK YOU

so there’s like a billion and one things going on in this painting (because it’s the middle of the renaissance and they got a li’l excited) so let’s break this down.

first off, it was painted smack dab in the middle of the renaissance (1533) which means people-with-money are interested in two primary things:

Self-Knowledge

Knowledge of God

this is important and will explain 90% of everything going on (the remaining 10% is just the painter showing off).

okay, so first off it’s called ambassadors because on either side we have a)a stately, educated man of the world, and b)a religious figure head. who precisely they were was up for debate for like 300 hundred years and isn’t really the point. what is the point is that one of them represents the best of man, and the other the best from God; they therefore are ambassadors of these two facets, and to prove their excellence, we have all the items on the shelves.

on the top shelf we’ve got a celestial globe, a sundial, a quadrant, a torquetum, etc. these are all things focused on learning the up there, the things beyond this world but yet are still scientific that humans are categorizing.

meanwhile on the bottom shelf, we’ve got the awesome things of human learning on earth: a terrestrial globe, a book of mathematics for merchants, a lute, hymnal, etc.

the point of having all these things is to show off the glory of human excellence when it comes to learning and also the artist’s ability to paint details. you’ve got the full trivium of learning going on: grammar, logic, rhetoric; and then also the quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy. everything is balanced.

H O W E V E R.

holbein is also problematizing human learning even as he’s extolling its virtues. for example, we have a broken string on the lute:

the instrument settings on the polyhedral sundial are actually wrong:

and, most importantly, that mother effing skull.

so the skull represents a couple things.

first, perspective was all 👏 the 👏  rage 👏  during the renaissance, and the better you were at it, the higher respect you got. so if you could draw something like this (which a previous commenter is correct, it was hung by a staircase so you would see it as you passed by), you automatically got that sweet sweet street cred. also if you don’t think it’s impressive that he could paint this by hand, you try it because dear lord it’s not fun pls pls professor let us go back to normal still lifes we’ll never complain about onion skins and tomatoes ever again aaaaaugh—

um so second, this is a form of memento mori, or vanitas, meaning “remember you must die” and “vanity” (a reference to ecclesiastes), respectively. the point of painting these was to remind the owner that they are mortal, and that time is short — and that no matter how much human knowledge they accumulated (the shelves), nothing could stop death.

side note: the placement of the skull is also important. the skull is a reference to death, the end of life, so it’s placed on the floor. compare this to michelangelo’s creation of adam, which is a reference to the beginning of life, and is placed on the sistine chapel’s ceiling. 

for life you look up, for death you look down.

AND BECAUSE OF THAT, we get to the last thing this painting is hiding:

a crucifix, tucked away in the top left corner so that you can barely see it, but once you do, you can’t unsee it. because, once again, this is the middle of the renaissance: holbein wants to stress both the importance of human knowledge (plato’s know thyself), and its limits (calvin’s ‘man never has clear knowledge of self until he has seen God’s face’). remember knowledge, remember death, remember christ.

and remember how good of a painter he is he needs more patrons.