SMS König was the first of four
König classdreadnought battleships of the
German Imperial Navy during
World War I. König (
Eng: "King") was named in honor of
Kaiser Wilhelm II of
Germany. Laid down in October 1911, the ship was launched on 1 March 1913. Construction on König finished shortly after the outbreak of World War I; she was
commissioned into the
High Seas Fleet on 9 August 1914. Along with her three
sister ships,
Grosser Kurfürst,
Markgraf, and
Kronprinz, König took part in most of the fleet actions during the war. As the leading ship in the German
line on 31 May 1916 in the
Battle of Jutland, König was heavily engaged by several British battleships and suffered ten large-caliber shell hits. In October 1917, she forced the Russian
pre-dreadnought battleship
Slava to scuttle itself during
Operation Albion. König was interned, along with the majority of the High Seas Fleet, in
Scapa Flow in November 1918 following the Armistice. On 21 June 1919, Rear Admiral
Ludwig von Reuter gave the order to
scuttle the fleet while the British guard ships were out of the harbor on exercises. König slipped beneath the waters of Scapa Flow at 14:00. Unlike most of the other scuttled ships, König was never raised for scrapping; the wreck is still sitting on the bottom of the bay. (
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The Ambassadors (1533) is a painting by
Hans Holbein the Younger in the
National Gallery, London. As well as being a double
portrait, the painting contains a
still life of several meticulously rendered objects, the meaning of which is the cause of much debate. The most notable and famous of Holbein's symbols in the work is the skewed
skull, rendered in
anamorphic perspective, which is placed in the painting's bottom centre. It is meant to be a visual puzzle as the viewer must approach the painting nearly from the side to see the form morph into an accurate rendering of a human skull.
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