Did you see that news story about scientists claiming to have discovered the ‘real’ face of Anne Boleyn?
Now that would be some feat, because her real face would have been on the head cut off by a French swordsman in 1536 at the behest of the corrupt court sycophants surrounding Henry VIII.
She was executed for adultery, incest and treason – charges which paved the way for Henry to dump rather than divorce Anne and make room for wife number three, Jane Seymour, and the potential for a male heir.
It was typical of this tyrant king.
No, this ‘real’ face is a previously unknown sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger in the Royal Collection.
The finding is the work of a computer science team from the University of Bradford, which used modern facial recognition techiniques to come up with the controversial theory.
They believe another sketch below in The Royal Collection was mislabelled and is more likely to be of Anne’s mother, Elizabeth (nee Howard).
It doesn’t really fit with the description we have of Anne with a long and slender neck and dark hair.
There is a fascinating blog about the various portraits of Anne here, which was written in 2020 and is still relevant now, even with this new ‘discovery’ which may or may not be what it seems.
Up until now, the painting below, from The National Portrait Gallery, is the one that has informed the modern world what the doomed queen might have looked like. It’s not contemporary, it’s Elizabethan, but it’s the one we all know.
So are we any closer to the truth? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – as we know from the famous Holbein painting of a sweet Anne of Cleves. We are told Henry was rather taken with the portrait but, apparently, when he saw the lady in real life, his reaction was that she was the spitting image of a “Flanders Mare”.
And looking at this image now again, could the ‘discovered’ portrait be, in fact, a sketch of Anne of Cleves?
What do you think?
Maddie Grigg 