According to AI analysis, the mysterious actress in the Holbein portrait could be Anne Boleyn

They are two small sketches by the Renaissance master Hans Holbein: one was long considered a portrait of Henry VIII’s doomed second wife, Anne Boleyn, and the other shows an unknown woman whose name was lost over time.

Now researchers have used AI to discover that the unnamed woman may be the tragic queen after all, while the other figure could actually be Boleyn’s mother.

The works, part of the royal collection and known respectively as the “Windsor Sketch” and “Unidentified Woman”, were analyzed by a team from the University of Bradford and found that they may have been mislabeled in the 18th century, leading to a misunderstanding that lasted for centuries.

Independent scholar Karen Davies examined the Holbein corpus of images, which number more than 80, and had doubts about the Windsor sketch, which shows the sitter in side profile.