The World on the Surface: The Ambassadors and the Globe of Hans Holbein the Younger

The article attempts to address to purely realistic plan of one of the most famous and full “secret schemes” paintings of the Northern Renaissance — The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger (1533). This plan is shaped by the scene of neighborhood, within which the people with particular status and function (ambassadors) and very specific things (many astronomical, geographic, arithmetic and musical things) are combined. What does this neighborhood demonstrate? Almost all the objects depicted by Holbein accompanying the ambassadors, have a direct bearing on observation practices and ways of capturing, transforming, organizing and representing their results. The article makes the cautious assumption that over the possible hidden meanings and semantic sediments the picture of Holbein documents the moment in history of Europe when the techniques of observation and the ways of its representative consolidation began to fit closely not only into large-scale political strategies, but also into routine state administration procedures, while political apparatus began to constitute itself as an apparatus of observation. Particular attention is paid to the terrestrial globe, depicted on Holbein’s picture, as an important part of these apparatus. For the Holbein’s epoch the terrestrial globe was a new object. Being concurrently an epistemological instrument and an instrument of political domination, terrestrial globe is a complex mechanism of synoptic vision and totalizing representation, that representative (cartographic) surface on which the hard work of assembling and controlling the world is carried out.