The image I have selected for the cover of this book—Hans Holbein the Younger's The Ambassadors (1533), also known as Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve—serves to illustrate my overall approach to and ambitions regarding the critical, theoretical, and disciplinary problematic of “world literature” in this project. A masterpiece of early modern European art, the life-sized double portrait was produced by the German artist during his second stay in England, which ran from 1532 until his death in 1543 and coincided with Henry VIII's break from the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation that was then sweeping across Europe. As the art historian Mary Hervey discovered in 1900, it was commissioned by de Dinteville—the figure on the left—to commemorate his friend and fellow subject de Selve's visit to London in 1533. The two men—the first a member of the noblesse d’épée and ambassador of the King of France and the second the Bishop of Lavaur—were in that year on a diplomatic mission seeking to reconcile Henry with the Pope. Holbein makes sure to weave into the painting a subtle commentary on the political and ecclesiastical conflicts that pervaded the dominions of Christendom at the time and that occasioned its commission and making in the first place—suggesting the discord and schisms of the continent, the terrestrial globe centered around Europe on the bottom shelf of the central display is upside down, the lute adjacent to it has a broken string, and the astronomical and other scientific instruments on the top shelf are misaligned for use in the northern latitude. Although it is of wider spiritual significance, the painting's memento mori—the famous anamorphic skull hidden in its bottom section—has been interpreted as a warning about the vanity of the ambassadors’ hopes and the inevitability of further upheaval in the European politico-religious order.