In an attempt to erase her from history, many of the original portraits of Anne Boleyn, the second wife of King Henry VIII, was destroyed after she was executed at the Tower of London in 1536.
Centuries after her death, there is only one undisputed image of the doomed queen, the Moost Happi medal, which is currently housed in the British museum. A computer scientist, however, has revealed that he has identified what could be another portrait of Anne with the aid of a facial recognition software.
Computer scientist Amit Roy-Chowdhury, video computing group head at the University of California at Riverside, has found that a portrait widely believed to be of Henry VIII's third wife was actually a portrayal of Anne. He used facial recognition technology to compare the image of Anne in the Moost Happi medal and the picture known as the Nidd Hall portrait long believed to be of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife and the mother of King Edward VI.
Art historians has long debated on who was really on the Nidd Hall portrait. Some believe that the painting depicted Jane but it was altered to look more like her predecessor after Elizabeth I, Anne's daughter, came to power.
The facial recognition software, however, suggests that the lady in the Nidd Hall portrait and the face that was printed on the Moost Happi Medal, which was stamped in 1534 to commemorate the expected birth of Anne's son, was the same.
The software was developed from systems that identify people in closed-circuit television (CCTV). It compared a series of physical proportion including the distance between the eyes and the width of the mouth to determine the extent of the match between the two images.
The discovery that the privately-owned Nidd Hall portrait was Anne's was significant because only a few images of her survived after her death, which could explain why little is known about her face.
Henry tried to erase Anne from history after having her executed. Anne was beheaded for charges that included witchcraft, incest and adultery but after the coronation of her daughter, Anne was venerated as a martyr.
"We often want to identify who is the person in the portrait," Roy-Chowdhury said. "What the computer gives at the end is another source of evidence for the discussions that have been going on about these questions."
