Holbein's "Ambassadors", the picture and the men : $b an historical study

"Holbein's "Ambassadors", the picture and the men" by Mary F. S. Hervey is an historical study written in the early 20th century. It investigates Hans Holbein’s double portrait The Ambassadors, identifying the sitters as Jean de Dinteville and George de Selve and reconstructing the painting’s provenance and intellectual setting. Using newly surfaced documents, close reading of the objects in the picture, and linked biographies, it shows how the work reflects French diplomacy, scholarship, science, and faith in the 1530s.

The opening of the study sets out its scope and method: a full history of the painting, documentary proof of the sitters’ identities, and analysis of the symbolic objects, supported by transcribed sources, translations, and illustrations. The Introduction recounts the picture’s move to the National Gallery, the loss and recovery of the sitters’ names, and the plan to read the imagery through the lives of the two friends. Part I traces the painting’s history from Holbein’s signed date of 1533, through a long obscurity, to its later mislabeling (via Le Brun and the Beaujon sale), and then clinches the correct identification with a seventeenth‑century Polisy parchment naming Dinteville and de Selve, corroborated by ecclesiastical records and a papal rescript; it follows the work from Polisy to Paris (1653) and outlines likely lines of descent that explain how the name “Avaux” crept into tradition before the picture resurfaced and passed to England and, finally, the National Gallery. Part II begins Dinteville’s biography: his noble Champagne-Burgundy lineage at Polisy, the family’s royal service, his likely humanist education, and his early court roles under powerful patrons such as Montmorency and the Du Bellay amid the post‑Pavia, anti‑Imperial politics symbolized by the League of Cognac. The narrative notes his father’s death and commemorations, the family’s connections to the Order of St. John through his brother Louis, and an episode involving his elder brother, the Bishop of Auxerre, that reveals the family’s reliance on court protection. Throughout, the start of the book emphasizes how archival sleuthing and contextual reading unlock the painting’s meaning while laying out the structure the rest of the study will follow. (This is an automatically generated summary.)