THE AMBASSADOR’S SECRET by John North, Hambledon & London, £20 (?

I’ll confide my most dreadful nightmare. I am alone, small, vulnerable and back at school,
seated at an ink-stained desk in a traditional classroom. A teacher is looming over me,
Draculine and long-nosed. Slowly he takes out of his pocket a pencil. “You see this, boy,” he
says, “you may think I’ve got an ordinary pencil here, but have you any idea of what a
marvellous thing it really is? All the work that goes into putting it together? Would you like
me to tell you?”
Before I can babble “No!” he is dragging me by the scruff of the neck on a nerve
racking journey. In ferocious detail he relates how the wood that made up the pencil came
from the dark forests of Norway and had to be shipped by boat from Goteborg to Newcastle,
after which it was pulped, milled and reconstituted, until the graphite had to be inserted in the
hollow tube. Another hour ticks by. And now he is minutely illustrating the method by which
the manufacturer’s name is embossed in gold on the wood, at which point I groan and black
out, praying that, when I awake, I’ll find myself beside some shapely, comforting nurse who
will pat me on the head, give me a warm glass of milk and a kiss on the cheek, saying,
“There, there lovie, it couldn’t be as bad as all that!”
John North’s The Ambassadors Secret is a 300-page ‘pencil’ disquisition – although
its subject matter is anything but commonplace. It is a massively wide-ranging and erudite
interpretation of Hans Holbein’s painting of two Gallic grandees, Georges de Selve and Jean
de Dinteville, a bishop and a bailly, clad in choicest silks and furs, their elbows leaning on an
exquisite desk, upon which there is place an array of navigational instruments, including a
globe, quadrant and cylinder dial, and below which there is a lute with a broken string. In the
foreground a startling distended skull is stretched across a geometrically decorated floor.
The painting is what is known as an anisotropic work or one which features various
distortions and oddities that invite decoding. Down the years it has attracted a host of theses -
sociological, political, psychological and heterodox - and naturally its recent restoration has
attracted a new batch of salutations from academia of which this present volume is the most
radical and challenging. Not only does John North elaborate the imagery and symbolism, he
maps out sight-lines, hexagrams and other significations. To take a single example, the left
eye of Christ, the left eye of Dinteville, the star Vega, the star Deneb in Cygnus, the north
point on the horizon – all these features diagonally line up and interact with each other, so the
images becomes an active discourse rather a single statement.
At first glance one might see the painting as an exercise in flattering one’s patrons.
The Ambassadors appear ruddy complexioned, full-faced and richly attired with the
instruments of worldly power about them. The globe, quadrant and cylinder stand for the
advances in exploration and science for which the Renaissance was renowned, the lute for
the sweet benefits conferred by the art of music, and the skull for the ever-anchoring fact of
mortality that does not discriminate between rich and poor.
Why then is the skull bizarrely distended? The sinister detail introduces a tremor of
surrealism into the ornate formality that is eerily appropriate in that Holbein himself,
tragically, was to die relatively young, probably of the plague, at the age of 46.
Furthermore, are the settings of the instruments random? Or are they minutely
calibrated to hint at the hidden meaning of the painting which, in North’s view, is redolent
with references to the rituals of Good Friday? A rival authority on the topic, Susan Foister,
asked whether they “are no more than an elaborate backdrop suggesting the passing of time,
for which accuracy of depiction seems to have been unnecessary” or, on the other hand, are
they “intended to be deliberately read as misdirected and mis-set, to suggest that times are
somehow out of joint?”
North dismisses both speculations, stating the design, when subject to the correct analysis,
yields a definite message harking back to its originators:

“The persons – or persons – chiefly responsible for its mathematical aspects needed to have
more than mere sympathy for Christian astrology. The distorted skull leads inevitably to that
conclusion. From the key line of sight along it we have been led to others, and on to a fitting
horoscope that commemorates the immediate aftermath of Christ’s death. The malevolent
Saturn is culminating while Jupiter, the planet of religion, has sunk to its lowest.”

John North’s develops the view, first adopted by Mary Hervey, that the painting conceals a
plea for religious concord, the 16th century being a time of rebellion and breakout, not to
mention the antics of Henry Vlll: “The line from Christ through the medallion of St Michael
and Rome goes through the peg with the broken lute string and the unhearing auricle of the
skull, before meeting the lower side in a point 20 inches from the right. The studied
symmetry of this line shows that, no matter what point was being made about Rome, it was
one that was carefully planned. Was Rome being placed centrally in order to declare Rome’s
supremacy in matters of faith?” Other parts of the painting are subject to a similarly zealous
analysis, allowing not only for mathematical exactitude, but for symbol and metaphor: “The
tip of the spike for the solar instrument? Does it denote the lance with which the Roman
soldier Longinus pierced the side of Christ?” Not even a fold in the curtain is allowed to
slumber in the texture of its integral nature: “It seems probable that there is an allusion to the
rending of the veil of the temple in the division of the green curtain, a third of the way along
the top.”
Spectacular, wide-ranging learning is at work here, and whether one should have a
salt sprinkler handy depends on how much one is prepared to give way to astronomic and
symbolic modes of communication. Tidy minds read the world as a tidy place and seldom
allow for the spontaneous gesture or the fact that any composition, if subject to an in-depth
analysis, will reveal a universe of meanings. Not that North claims for Holbein such a
compendious knowledge. He believes a conspiracy of learning is present here, with a major
contribution from the astronomer, Nicolaus Kratzer, in which the intrigues of the day collude
with scientific advances set against a backdrop of pagan mysticism, the crucifixion,
mathematics and occult theory.
A pall of irony hangs over the enterprise, in that a painting invites us to take in
colours and textures in a blink of the eye, but here a dance of light is transformed into a
chunky esoteric textbook. It is patently unfair to say that, if Holbein had wanted to say all
that, he would have written North’s book instead, but it does drive home the point that
pulping a visual masterpiece through a word-mill is not necessarily the correct way to distil
an artist’s vision.
But whether or not North has achieved the ultimate interpretation, his book stands as
a landmark in structural analysis. The Ambassadors has always been recognised as a painting
of tremendous scope and he has succeeded in extending its field of concern. What’s more
the diagrams and magnifications are superb; the colour photographs yield details that beguile
the eye. North has done for Holbein what John Livingstone Lowes once did for Coleridge,
but I hope his example will not produce a plethora of similar texts. Imagine treating the
paintings of Salvador Dali or Max Ernst in the same way. What Freudian mind monsters! –
what miracles and mystifications! – would be unleashed on an unsuspecting world!