A new study has suggested that a 16th-century portrait in Britain’s Royal Collection Trust is of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, executed at the Tower of London in 1536.
In addition, the study has suggested that a second sketch originally said to portray Anne Boleyn actually doesn’t. Instead, it is of her mother, Elizabeth Howard.
The team of researchers at the University of Bradford used an A.I. model to identify the historical figures. The model has been trained to analyze bone architecture, facial proportions, and geometric features.
“Recent advances in computer vision and deep learning have enabled facial recognition systems to achieve human-level or superhuman performance in identifying individuals,” wrote the researchers.
“Biometric analysis offers quantifiable evidence to evaluate competing attribution hypotheses, which is of a particular value when scholars acknowledge uncertainty about sitters’ identifications.”
About 500 years ago, Hans Holbein the Younger, a highly revered German artist, traveled to England to create portraits of the Tudor court. His portraits of the Tudor court are among the finest artworks from the Renaissance era.
Holbein was born in Augsburg, Germany, and worked in Basel before moving to England, where he created sketches and portraits.
He had moved to get away from the chaos of the Reformation of Europe, but found himself in the middle of Henry VIII’s messy court.
Today, 85 of Holbein’s drawings remain in a royal collection at Windsor Castle. Only 30 of them have been firmly identified. The others were labeled in the 1700s, so modern scholars doubt the accuracy of these inscriptions.
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Evidence of written records suggests that one of the drawings is of Anne Boleyn, but it is unclear which one. So, the research team worked together to assess portraits of Anne Boleyn’s family members using facial recognition technology to detect any resemblances.
They looked at the entire collection of art and compared images.
“The Holbein drawings functioned as working likenesses, technical blueprints for painted portraits,” said David Stork, who teaches in the materials science and engineering department at Stanford University.
“That makes them uniquely suited to biometric analysis, which measures bone structure and proportion rather than hairstyle or costume.”
According to the new analysis, the unidentified woman drawing is of Anne Boleyn. The portrait that was considered her likeness aligns more closely with her mother, Queen Elizabeth.
Furthermore, the pink preparatory paper that Holbein used for his sketches was specifically only used when he was in England, from 1532 to 1543, which coincides with Anne’s reign.
Overall, the facial recognition analysis demonstrates that the unidentified woman drawing has a 79% similarity rate as the portrait of 13-year-old Elizabeth I, which is consistent with mother-daughter relationships in the researchers’ dataset.
The findings of the study were published in the journal npj Heritage Science.
By Emily Chan
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