Painted in 1533, Holbein's The Ambassadors depicts the French ambassador Jean de Dinteville and the bishop-diplomat Georges de Selve standing on either side of a two-tiered table loaded with the instruments of Renaissance learning: celestial and terrestrial globes, a sundial, a quadrant, a polyhedron, a lute, a book of arithmetic, a hymnal, a flute case. The two men are full-length, life-sized, and dressed in the formal attire of their stations. The composition is one of the most carefully programmed portraits of the entire sixteenth century.

The painting is famous for its anamorphic skull in the foreground, visible as a strange diagonal smudge across the lower third of the canvas when viewed frontally, resolving into a skull when viewed from the painting's lower-right at a steep angle. The skull is a memento mori inscribed into the diplomatic-portrait genre, a reminder that all the worldly achievement represented above (statecraft, scholarship, music, navigation, mathematics) cannot prevent death. The complete iconographic program is among the most thoroughly studied in Western art history.

The painting is held in the National Gallery, London. It was commissioned by Dinteville himself during his embassy to the court of Henry VIII, at the time Henry was breaking with Rome over the divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The painting's iconography, including a strategically broken lute string symbolizing religious discord, has been read as a coded comment on the Anglican Schism that Dinteville and de Selve were observing as Catholic French observers.