Is this the true face of Anne Boleyn? | BBC News

The segment begins by framing Anne Boleyn as one of England's most famous historical figures — Henry VIII's second wife, whose marriage triggered England's break from the Roman Catholic Church. She became queen, mothered the future Queen Elizabeth I, but was executed at the Tower of London after only three years as queen. A curator at the National Portrait Gallery explains that no definitively authenticated lifetime portrait of Anne Boleyn exists, partly because her reign was short and possibly because some images were deliberately destroyed after her execution.

The investigation centers on whether modern facial recognition technology can fill this historical gap. A team from the University of Bradford applied facial recognition algorithms — trained on photographs — to a collection of historical drawings, including a sketch attributed to Hans Holbein the Younger. This sketch has long been considered a likely likeness of Anne Boleyn, though it carries several points of contention: the labeling appears to be in an 18th-century hand rather than Tudor-era script, the subject has light-colored hair while Anne was thought to be dark-haired, and the informal dress seems unusual for a queen.

The Bradford team compared the drawings to Anne Boleyn's known first cousins and her daughter Elizabeth I, finding facial geometry clustering among related individuals. Based on this clustering analysis, they proposed a surprising new theory: the traditionally accepted Holbein sketch may actually depict Anne Boleyn's mother, while a previously unidentified drawing in the collection could in fact be Anne herself.

The theory is met with strong skepticism from an art historian, who calls it 'a load of old foolery,' arguing that treating centuries-old drawings as equivalent to modern photographs is methodologically flawed. The skeptic points out that the traditionally accepted sketch is labeled 'Anne Boleyn Queen' in handwriting traced to someone who actually knew what she looked like, and that the informal pose in the sketch is consistent with Anne's frequent pregnancies during her reign. The Bradford team, however, positions their work not as a definitive conclusion but as the beginning of a conversation and a new tool to complement traditional art historical scholarship.