In the previous two years I’d created a Treasure Skull and a Cyberpunk for Local Color’s 31 Skulls fundraiser. For this year, I created an homage to a famous skull of art history: the distorted skull from Hans Holbein the Younger’s painting “The Ambassadors”.
“The Ambassadors” contains many of the techniques of the day that were pleasing to wealthy patrons who commissioned portraits: the tile floor and fabrics are rendered in luxurious detail, the objects are detailed and meaningful to tell the story of who they are, and (or course) the portraiture is highly flattering. But it goes a step beyond. Besides the crisp perspectives (ah, lutes) there is also a somewhat bizarre trompe l’oeil of an anamorphic skull at the bottom only visible from a particular angle by a viewer on the lower left.
So instead of an anamorphic skull on a painting, I made an anamorphic painting on a ceramic skull. The floor details wrapped readily around the base of the skull. And the table lined up nicely with the jaw, as did the lute with the cheekbone.
In my version, the ambassadors themselves are the most distorted. You can see them if you tilt the skull and look at it from the bottom.
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