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igenlodeAfter finishing this book, I realised that I still have no idea what the "previously undetected central theme" of the painting, as trailed on the back cover, is actually claimed to be! The theorised existence of a set of geometrical figures superimposed on the images? The repeated encoding of a gradient of 1 in 2 in various increasingly esoteric interpretations? The author, John North, is certainly no Dan Brown, and he isn't attempting to make out a code to any world-shaking secrets or hidden treasures; his arguments appear to mainly hinge around geometry and relative angles, but having read them all I find myself unclear as to where they are actually supposed to lead.
And I can't help remembering that this is a picture of two human beings, one of whom presumably paid Holbein to paint it to commemorate his meeting with the other, and without seeking to encode any mystical knowledge (since by the author's own admission neither of the sitters was any sort of expert in the fields with which he is seeking to associate the portrait's content, and moreover neither was Holbein himself). So the whole theory seems to rest on the presumption that a *fourth party* -- identified by the author as the astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer, whom he points out is known to have collaborated with Holbein on at least one previous occasion -- calculated and asked Holbein to insert a lot of extra details into a painting that was already being produced for another purpose, and I don't really see what any of them would have got out of this.
It wasn't a picture that was going to be on public display to make a point, unlike Holbein's famous (and now lost) painting of Henry VIII and his family. It was a private commission by a distinguished visitor to England, who a few months afterwards left the country and took the painting home with him, where it remained buried in the depths of the French countryside for the next hundred and fifty years, by which point the locals had forgotten whom it actually depicted (the identities of the sitters were not rediscovered until the start of the 20th century). It seems unlikely that any distinguished astronomers or astrologers would ever have visited the chateau at Polisy to set eyes on it, so any esoteric structure encoded into the painting presumably existed purely for the satisfaction of the artist/designer.
What the book doesn't, so far as I could see, mention, is how the two sitters came to know each other in the first place. The author describes them as intimate friends, but the only evidence we seem to have for this is a letter written home by Dinteville (on the left) saying that the Bishop of Lavaur (on the right) had paid him a visit in London, a visit "qui ne m'a e[s]té petit plaisir", and the fact that they apparently met on another occasion after they had both separately returned to France, before the Bishop in his turn was sent off as ambassador to Venice. And, of course, the fact that they chose to be painted together to mark his visit to London. It would be nice to have some idea of how and when they originally became acquainted and what the friendship consisted of, but presumably this is lost in the mists of time....
I'm afraid the book loses me on the details of astronomy and celestial geometry; the meridian circle, the azimuth of the Sun and its ecliptic longitude, lines projected at different latitudes, and so on. I gave up trying to understand it intellectually at a fairly early stage and simply skimmed over the diagrams, accepting that I couldn't fathom how the various instruments were intended to function, let alone come to any reasoned verdict as to the validity of the conclusions that the author was drawing from their positioning on the table in the 'still life' at the centre of the painting. He does make the interesting although apparently well-known point that there physically could *not* have been an eclipse at the Crucifixion as described in the New Testament, because it was supposed to take place at Passover, the time of which is already set by the position of the Moon relative to the Sun, so the Moon could not possibly have passed in front of the Sun at that date; of course once medieval astronomy had progressed to the point at which they realised the actual cause of eclipses, this was simply explained away by saying that it was clearly a miraculous phenomenon and not a physical one.
A lot of the arguments made by the author relate to the apparent existence of a discreet crucifix located behind the curtain in the top left-hand corner of the painting, which he says was unknown to the original interpreters of the painting since it did not become visible until after restoration/cleaning work was done. Ironically it is not visible in the full-plate illustration given as Plate 1 in this (paperback) edition of the book, and neither is the additional strip of plain marble which he describes as being painted along the bottom of the image to change its proportions, and from which he likewise draws deductions -- these 'blank' areas of the image have evidently been cropped in by the photo editor so as to show the details in the rest of the painting more closely, and their location can only be guessed at from the line-sketches included in the main text!
[Edit: the full version is given as the frontispiece to the book. The crucifix is *tiny* and at that scale quite unidentifiable as such, but you can at least see what he is referring to.]
As a historian of science he traces the nature and function of the various astronomical instruments in detail, in the process saying that he can refute the claims of earlier interpreters that they are variously 'wrong' (and their interpretations based on that) -- apart from the markings on Holbein's celestial globe, which he argues in an appendix clearly *are* simply a mistake ("Faulty restoration is quite certainly not to blame"). But he draws from that the conclusion not that the painter simply skipped a point on the scale by mistake and continued numbering relative to what he had painted previously, but that he was actively trying to cover up for other minor errors in perspective and relative positioning. "I am reasonably certain that he pricked his lines through a paper draft, or something of the sort, and that this slipped slightly to the right as he did so" -- and that he only subsequently came to paint in the scale markings, at which point he realised that things didn't add up, as it were.
I can actually easily believe that, since it is the sort of human-relatable error that occurs to anyone who is focusing in on the fine detail of one area of a complex composition -- and, as the author also points out, various different areas of the painting clearly are painted from incompatible perspectives or scales (if you try to deduce real-life measurements, the two men are apparently either only about five feet high relative to their surroundings, or else over six foot. But of course they would have been painted separately from the imaginary background, and presumably independently of one another...) It does, however, feel to me a little too convenient that this one astronomical inconsistency can be cheerfully explained away, whereas the minutiae of the positioning and visible numbering on other elements of the painting are used to deduce the existence of encoded information.
The author says that the pavement on which the two men are depicted is a modified scale copy of the ornate pavement in Westminster Abbey, but with an extra (almost invisible under the table) arcane hexagram added in the centre of the design, which does not exist in the real-life prototype. And he points out that the historically recorded texts inlaid into the Abbey floor -- now only fragmentary, but preserved in accounts from earlier centuries -- do indeed involve precisely the sort of obscure numerological allusion that he is ascribing to this painting, and that was undeniably the subject of vast amounts of theological and philosophical debate by mediaeval writers, e.g. "SEPES TRIMA CANES ET EQUOS HOMINESQUE SUBADDAS / CERVOS ET CORVOS AQUILAS IMMANIA CETE / MUNDUM QUOQUE SEQUENS PREEUNTIS TRIPLICAT ANNOS", an instruction to the reader to multiply the 'years' of each creature mentioned by three, resulting in a figure of three raised to the power of nine, giving the age of the world.
What I find much more compelling (because, again, it is a human and historical theory rather than an abstract geometric one) is his suggestion that the discrepancies between the pictured pavement and the stonework visible in the Abbey are because the two men are portrayed standing on a contemporary copy of that design, a floor that had been painted *to resemble* a pavement, as is indeed recorded as having been done at that period in the palace at Greenwich "with orbys and antyke work" and was widely done in later centuries as a cheaper substitute for marble columns, for example. Holbein himself is known to have painted an ornate temporary ceiling at Greenwich for the purposes of a previous French embassy, in known association with Kratzer; the author suggests that "it is not impossible that the painted floor in the portrait is left over" from that earlier occasion, in which case the artist might have been the one to paint it, and that "Holbein the measurer, Holbein the draftsman had probably made a scale plan of the Abbey pavement" or had access to plans prepared by someone else.
In any case, since, as he says, a closer look at the portrait suggests that it does indeed show a floor of painted wood rather than a real pavement (with dark lines showing between the coloured 'tiles' rather than a mortar setting), whether or not the floor in question had been rendered by Holbein or by another specialist in such work, this would supply an elegantly simple explanation of the fact that it is on a much smaller domestic scale (the author argues exactly half) than the vast design in the Abbey and that the design has been adapted/inaccurately copied. It need not be an imaginary background carrying deep symbolic significance; it may simply be a picture of the actual floor of the building in which the ambassadors were staying, or of the court at Greenwich.
The book is reasonably readable despite what is on the whole extremely abstruse subject matter. The author is clearly aware of the potential hazards of such abstract interpretation and of the mediaeval passion for finding theological significance in numbers: "This astronomical fact may be without deep significance", "From the Book of Revelation one may prove almost anything", "We are now in the land of meaning by association, a somewhat lawless territory", "he might simply have said that if Chaucer could express the time and date in shadows, so could he. As I am sure he did", "The systems of thought which we have touched upon in these pages were real[...] rewarded by money for example, by satisfaction, by glory, even by death. They were real, but whether they are to be found in the painting needs supporting argument", "by combining and transforming numbers and their 'meanings' in various ways it must have seemed that almost anything was possible. That should have worried people, but of course it had exactly the opposite effect". Holbein was "a painter with neither the scholarship to work out an elaborate story nor perhaps even the time or inclination to work one out". The writing has touches of wry humour: Sir Thomas More allegedly once decided to model his life on that of Pico della Mirandola -- "More too was once young" -- and elsewhere "never underestimated his own moral value".
Overall, however, I am left at a loss as to what solution of the "riddle of 'The Ambassadors'" is supposedly supplied in this book, or even the nature of that riddle. (Again, on a human level I find it personally more surprising that the written record of Jean de Dinteville's letters home has him constantly ill and unhappy during his stay in England, but that the portrayal of him in this picture shows no trace of a man worn down by fever or homesickness; presumably flattery on the artist's part, as in his ill-fated portrait of Anne of Cleves for her prospective husband's benefit?)
I can accept that the picture clearly contains a perspective-distorted skull as a rather unpleasant interruption to what is otherwise a harmoniously composed and lavishly realistic image, and that there was presumably some reason for this -- and some reason why the sitter would have accepted it in the finished result for which he was presumably paying dearly! One of the author's arguments is that the necessary angle at which the viewer must stand to foreshorten the skull into its correct proportions then positions him at the right angle to look directly up into the face of the crucified Christ, while aligning the eye with various identifiable points in the rest of the painting such as the angled gnomon on one of the sundials and one of the eyes of Dinteville's portrait. Confusingly, this appears to require looking *down* upon the skull (which would at least explain why I have never been able to get it to foreshorten satisfactorily when attempting to view it from below in the National Gallery!), which so far as I can see from the supplied diagram would require the viewer's head to be located above that section of the image in a painting which is about seven feet tall overall.
I suppose that, if it were displayed standing at ground level rather than being hung high on a museum wall as it is at present, this might be physically feasible; I don't know what Tudor customs were like in this respect. And if that were the case (which the author has *not* touched upon!) then the idea that the purpose of the very obviously intrusive skull is simply to get the viewer subconsciously into a fixed position relative to various mystic viewing lines on the painting would hold some weight.
And I can accept that mediaeval thought (and the author is very insistent, and credibly so, that Tudor England was far more 'mediaeval' than 'Renaissance') set a lot of value on philosophical niceties that are completely opaque to us, made little real distinction between astrology and religion, and played intellectual games on a grand scale which those who were intellectuals --as opposed to talented artisans-- took very seriously. But I went into this book with a known bias against 'conspiracy theories' that set out to prove the unlikely via a complex web of circumstantial evidence, and I'm afraid it hasn't converted me.
Like Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker", it stretched my brain a good deal to read it. Unlike the Sayers book -- which ultimately didn't convert me either -- I ended up by simply not bothering to attempt to wrap my mind around the technical arguments, and reading on in the hopes of finding elements elsewhere in the text that actually interested me... which I did (see above). So I can't honestly claim to have given it a fair trial, or to be qualified to judge its suggested reading of the painting, not least because I'm not clear quite what that may be.
All I can say is that I went in a sceptic and came out a sceptic, but one with a slightly better knowledge of the historical context and religious symbolism of the early sixteenth century!
And I can't help remembering that this is a picture of two human beings, one of whom presumably paid Holbein to paint it to commemorate his meeting with the other, and without seeking to encode any mystical knowledge (since by the author's own admission neither of the sitters was any sort of expert in the fields with which he is seeking to associate the portrait's content, and moreover neither was Holbein himself). So the whole theory seems to rest on the presumption that a *fourth party* -- identified by the author as the astronomer Nicolaus Kratzer, whom he points out is known to have collaborated with Holbein on at least one previous occasion -- calculated and asked Holbein to insert a lot of extra details into a painting that was already being produced for another purpose, and I don't really see what any of them would have got out of this.
It wasn't a picture that was going to be on public display to make a point, unlike Holbein's famous (and now lost) painting of Henry VIII and his family. It was a private commission by a distinguished visitor to England, who a few months afterwards left the country and took the painting home with him, where it remained buried in the depths of the French countryside for the next hundred and fifty years, by which point the locals had forgotten whom it actually depicted (the identities of the sitters were not rediscovered until the start of the 20th century). It seems unlikely that any distinguished astronomers or astrologers would ever have visited the chateau at Polisy to set eyes on it, so any esoteric structure encoded into the painting presumably existed purely for the satisfaction of the artist/designer.
What the book doesn't, so far as I could see, mention, is how the two sitters came to know each other in the first place. The author describes them as intimate friends, but the only evidence we seem to have for this is a letter written home by Dinteville (on the left) saying that the Bishop of Lavaur (on the right) had paid him a visit in London, a visit "qui ne m'a e[s]té petit plaisir", and the fact that they apparently met on another occasion after they had both separately returned to France, before the Bishop in his turn was sent off as ambassador to Venice. And, of course, the fact that they chose to be painted together to mark his visit to London. It would be nice to have some idea of how and when they originally became acquainted and what the friendship consisted of, but presumably this is lost in the mists of time....
I'm afraid the book loses me on the details of astronomy and celestial geometry; the meridian circle, the azimuth of the Sun and its ecliptic longitude, lines projected at different latitudes, and so on. I gave up trying to understand it intellectually at a fairly early stage and simply skimmed over the diagrams, accepting that I couldn't fathom how the various instruments were intended to function, let alone come to any reasoned verdict as to the validity of the conclusions that the author was drawing from their positioning on the table in the 'still life' at the centre of the painting. He does make the interesting although apparently well-known point that there physically could *not* have been an eclipse at the Crucifixion as described in the New Testament, because it was supposed to take place at Passover, the time of which is already set by the position of the Moon relative to the Sun, so the Moon could not possibly have passed in front of the Sun at that date; of course once medieval astronomy had progressed to the point at which they realised the actual cause of eclipses, this was simply explained away by saying that it was clearly a miraculous phenomenon and not a physical one.
A lot of the arguments made by the author relate to the apparent existence of a discreet crucifix located behind the curtain in the top left-hand corner of the painting, which he says was unknown to the original interpreters of the painting since it did not become visible until after restoration/cleaning work was done. Ironically it is not visible in the full-plate illustration given as Plate 1 in this (paperback) edition of the book, and neither is the additional strip of plain marble which he describes as being painted along the bottom of the image to change its proportions, and from which he likewise draws deductions -- these 'blank' areas of the image have evidently been cropped in by the photo editor so as to show the details in the rest of the painting more closely, and their location can only be guessed at from the line-sketches included in the main text!
[Edit: the full version is given as the frontispiece to the book. The crucifix is *tiny* and at that scale quite unidentifiable as such, but you can at least see what he is referring to.]
As a historian of science he traces the nature and function of the various astronomical instruments in detail, in the process saying that he can refute the claims of earlier interpreters that they are variously 'wrong' (and their interpretations based on that) -- apart from the markings on Holbein's celestial globe, which he argues in an appendix clearly *are* simply a mistake ("Faulty restoration is quite certainly not to blame"). But he draws from that the conclusion not that the painter simply skipped a point on the scale by mistake and continued numbering relative to what he had painted previously, but that he was actively trying to cover up for other minor errors in perspective and relative positioning. "I am reasonably certain that he pricked his lines through a paper draft, or something of the sort, and that this slipped slightly to the right as he did so" -- and that he only subsequently came to paint in the scale markings, at which point he realised that things didn't add up, as it were.
I can actually easily believe that, since it is the sort of human-relatable error that occurs to anyone who is focusing in on the fine detail of one area of a complex composition -- and, as the author also points out, various different areas of the painting clearly are painted from incompatible perspectives or scales (if you try to deduce real-life measurements, the two men are apparently either only about five feet high relative to their surroundings, or else over six foot. But of course they would have been painted separately from the imaginary background, and presumably independently of one another...) It does, however, feel to me a little too convenient that this one astronomical inconsistency can be cheerfully explained away, whereas the minutiae of the positioning and visible numbering on other elements of the painting are used to deduce the existence of encoded information.
The author says that the pavement on which the two men are depicted is a modified scale copy of the ornate pavement in Westminster Abbey, but with an extra (almost invisible under the table) arcane hexagram added in the centre of the design, which does not exist in the real-life prototype. And he points out that the historically recorded texts inlaid into the Abbey floor -- now only fragmentary, but preserved in accounts from earlier centuries -- do indeed involve precisely the sort of obscure numerological allusion that he is ascribing to this painting, and that was undeniably the subject of vast amounts of theological and philosophical debate by mediaeval writers, e.g. "SEPES TRIMA CANES ET EQUOS HOMINESQUE SUBADDAS / CERVOS ET CORVOS AQUILAS IMMANIA CETE / MUNDUM QUOQUE SEQUENS PREEUNTIS TRIPLICAT ANNOS", an instruction to the reader to multiply the 'years' of each creature mentioned by three, resulting in a figure of three raised to the power of nine, giving the age of the world.
What I find much more compelling (because, again, it is a human and historical theory rather than an abstract geometric one) is his suggestion that the discrepancies between the pictured pavement and the stonework visible in the Abbey are because the two men are portrayed standing on a contemporary copy of that design, a floor that had been painted *to resemble* a pavement, as is indeed recorded as having been done at that period in the palace at Greenwich "with orbys and antyke work" and was widely done in later centuries as a cheaper substitute for marble columns, for example. Holbein himself is known to have painted an ornate temporary ceiling at Greenwich for the purposes of a previous French embassy, in known association with Kratzer; the author suggests that "it is not impossible that the painted floor in the portrait is left over" from that earlier occasion, in which case the artist might have been the one to paint it, and that "Holbein the measurer, Holbein the draftsman had probably made a scale plan of the Abbey pavement" or had access to plans prepared by someone else.
In any case, since, as he says, a closer look at the portrait suggests that it does indeed show a floor of painted wood rather than a real pavement (with dark lines showing between the coloured 'tiles' rather than a mortar setting), whether or not the floor in question had been rendered by Holbein or by another specialist in such work, this would supply an elegantly simple explanation of the fact that it is on a much smaller domestic scale (the author argues exactly half) than the vast design in the Abbey and that the design has been adapted/inaccurately copied. It need not be an imaginary background carrying deep symbolic significance; it may simply be a picture of the actual floor of the building in which the ambassadors were staying, or of the court at Greenwich.
The book is reasonably readable despite what is on the whole extremely abstruse subject matter. The author is clearly aware of the potential hazards of such abstract interpretation and of the mediaeval passion for finding theological significance in numbers: "This astronomical fact may be without deep significance", "From the Book of Revelation one may prove almost anything", "We are now in the land of meaning by association, a somewhat lawless territory", "he might simply have said that if Chaucer could express the time and date in shadows, so could he. As I am sure he did", "The systems of thought which we have touched upon in these pages were real[...] rewarded by money for example, by satisfaction, by glory, even by death. They were real, but whether they are to be found in the painting needs supporting argument", "by combining and transforming numbers and their 'meanings' in various ways it must have seemed that almost anything was possible. That should have worried people, but of course it had exactly the opposite effect". Holbein was "a painter with neither the scholarship to work out an elaborate story nor perhaps even the time or inclination to work one out". The writing has touches of wry humour: Sir Thomas More allegedly once decided to model his life on that of Pico della Mirandola -- "More too was once young" -- and elsewhere "never underestimated his own moral value".
Overall, however, I am left at a loss as to what solution of the "riddle of 'The Ambassadors'" is supposedly supplied in this book, or even the nature of that riddle. (Again, on a human level I find it personally more surprising that the written record of Jean de Dinteville's letters home has him constantly ill and unhappy during his stay in England, but that the portrayal of him in this picture shows no trace of a man worn down by fever or homesickness; presumably flattery on the artist's part, as in his ill-fated portrait of Anne of Cleves for her prospective husband's benefit?)
I can accept that the picture clearly contains a perspective-distorted skull as a rather unpleasant interruption to what is otherwise a harmoniously composed and lavishly realistic image, and that there was presumably some reason for this -- and some reason why the sitter would have accepted it in the finished result for which he was presumably paying dearly! One of the author's arguments is that the necessary angle at which the viewer must stand to foreshorten the skull into its correct proportions then positions him at the right angle to look directly up into the face of the crucified Christ, while aligning the eye with various identifiable points in the rest of the painting such as the angled gnomon on one of the sundials and one of the eyes of Dinteville's portrait. Confusingly, this appears to require looking *down* upon the skull (which would at least explain why I have never been able to get it to foreshorten satisfactorily when attempting to view it from below in the National Gallery!), which so far as I can see from the supplied diagram would require the viewer's head to be located above that section of the image in a painting which is about seven feet tall overall.
I suppose that, if it were displayed standing at ground level rather than being hung high on a museum wall as it is at present, this might be physically feasible; I don't know what Tudor customs were like in this respect. And if that were the case (which the author has *not* touched upon!) then the idea that the purpose of the very obviously intrusive skull is simply to get the viewer subconsciously into a fixed position relative to various mystic viewing lines on the painting would hold some weight.
And I can accept that mediaeval thought (and the author is very insistent, and credibly so, that Tudor England was far more 'mediaeval' than 'Renaissance') set a lot of value on philosophical niceties that are completely opaque to us, made little real distinction between astrology and religion, and played intellectual games on a grand scale which those who were intellectuals --as opposed to talented artisans-- took very seriously. But I went into this book with a known bias against 'conspiracy theories' that set out to prove the unlikely via a complex web of circumstantial evidence, and I'm afraid it hasn't converted me.
Like Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Mind of the Maker", it stretched my brain a good deal to read it. Unlike the Sayers book -- which ultimately didn't convert me either -- I ended up by simply not bothering to attempt to wrap my mind around the technical arguments, and reading on in the hopes of finding elements elsewhere in the text that actually interested me... which I did (see above). So I can't honestly claim to have given it a fair trial, or to be qualified to judge its suggested reading of the painting, not least because I'm not clear quite what that may be.
All I can say is that I went in a sceptic and came out a sceptic, but one with a slightly better knowledge of the historical context and religious symbolism of the early sixteenth century!
no subject
Date: 2025-08-13 11:16 am (UTC)(North does point out that if, as seems likely, the details of the painting were not completed until after Georges de Selve had already left the country, it would probably have been a very long time before he learned of the existence of a Lutheran hymn-book painted in adjacent to his person -- if ever. As he was subsequently sent on his own missions abroad as ambassador to Rome, then Venice, then accompanying the Holy Roman Emperor to Ghent and the Hague, (where he fell sick, returned home, and died at the age of 32) it doesn't sound to me as if he had much opportunity to visit Dinteville's home where the painting was displayed, although presumably he would have been at least mildly curious to view the finished product at some point. The sole meeting North records as taking place between them after London was when the French Court was down at Lyon.)
There was apparently a sizeable community of German merchants in Tudor London, in an enclave known as the Steelyard https://livinglondonhistory.com/the-curious-history-of-steelyard-passage-and-the-hanseatic-league/ The hymnal could have had its origins from pretty much anyone there, if borrowed as a prop, or it could have belonged to Kratzer, who does seem a likely source for the various astronomical instruments depicted even if he had nothing to do with encoding mystic messages into the painting; they definitely knew one another (Kratzer's handwriting is found labelling the sitters in a sketch of the More family portrait which Holbein sent to Erasmus). North mentions also that Thomas Cranmer's wife was German and the niece of a prominent Protestant reformer.
One of the reasons given (explicitly, in the letter of recommendation written by Erasmus on his behalf) for Holbein's emigration was that the painting of [Catholic] devotional art, which had hitherto been a major part of his livelihood and that of many other painters, had dried up as a result of the religious disturbances. "Some of his religious paintings were among those destoryed by the mob in a notorious outburst of iconoclasm in Basel on Shrove Tuesday, 1529. In a separate incident, iconoclasts destroyed his father's altarpiece in the church of St Moritz in Augsburg.[...] The worldly-wise artist needed to change direction quickly". North also cites "the circumspect answer he gave to a McCarthy-style committee set up by the reform party to enquire into citizens' religious orthodoxy[...] 'Master Hans Holbein the painter says that he needs a better explanation of Holy Communion before he will go'", although he was later registered as an official Lutheran in Basel (quite probably a decision for his own safety, by the sounds of it). In 1532, he left the city for good... only to end up in the midst of Henry VIII's religious haverings, and see his own earlier patron Sir Thomas More get executed on those grounds.
I would guess that Holbein was probably a pragmatist rather than a believer of any ardent stripe. Certainly his livelihood required him to go where the money was -- whether that was painting house facades in Basel, making woodcuts for book illustrations, drawing up jewellery designs for Anne Boleyn, taking German commissions for orthodox religious images or portraying an English military victory on the arch of the new banqueting hall in Greenwich (or teaming up with the King's astronomer Kratzer to depict a 'cosmographic display' on a canvas ceiling for a celebratory masque).
But the hymnal could very well have been his, dating back if nothing else to his final years in the reformatory ferment of Basel before he abandoned his former home -- along with the wife and children he left behind there...