Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> No wonder then that artists from Leonardo and D?rer to Boetti and Ruscha have been fascinated by maps: the cartographer’s problem is the draughtsman’s problem the problem of perspective. Holbein understood this perfectly. In his famous painting The Ambassadors two statesmen stand surrounded by cartographic paraphernalia: globes a torquetum a quadrant and so on. Yet occupying the space between the two men on the carpet is a proto-Googlish blur an anamorphic zone in which the entire image goes all ‘wrong’. As visitors to London’s National Gallery discover when they move round to the painting’s side this zone resolves itself into the image of a skull which looms into focus at the very moment the men and their instruments melt away into an imbroglio of random marks. Thus Holbein confronts us with the futility not only of wealth and status but also of perspective itself: beyond a certain limit both are doomed to formlessness to vanishing – to the skull and by extension to death. (MP)