A detail that remained hidden under a famous painting for almost five hundred years has come to light, revealing a forgotten but precious story. It is the Guardian that reveals that, using infrared technology, a group of scholars has found another drawing under the surface layers of a famous sixteenth-century English painting, a triangular shape, which tells us what some English intellectuals thought of the Queen of England Anna Boleyn.
Let’s take a step back.
It was the 1533 when the king of England Henry VIII divorce by his wife Catherine of Aragon, an act that led him to break with the Catholic Church and found the Anglican Church. At that point he was able to marry again Anna Boleyn.
This was a fact which led to the outbreak of heavy wars throughout England accusations of witchcraft against the new queen consort. These worsened with the passage of time, also given the bad reputation that Anna earned among her husband failing to conceive a male heir. In the 1536 she was imprisoned for adultery in the Tower of London, then found guilty of treason and beheaded.
In the following years, Henry VIII, who married six wives, had every trace of Anne erased, to the point that no portrait made during her lifetime has survived to the present day. However, a famous painting from a later period survives, the portrait of Anne Boleyn of Hever Castle, also called “Rose”: it is one of the most famous paintings in the history of English art, created on a wooden panel a few decades later during the years of the reign of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth I of England.
Scientific analysis of the painting has both allowed us to date the panel around 1583 (through dendrochronology, i.e. the counting of the rings of the wood) and, through infrared, to discover the precise moment in which the Elizabethan artist moved away from the preparatory drawing: this model actually presented a triangle below the subject, which would have ensured that the hands could not be seen. The author instead decided to discard this option for depict Anna in the gesture of holding a red rose, with her hands and fingers clearly visible.
But what does this choice mean, and why is it so relevant? Showing all the fingers had a specific purpose in the eyes of the beholder, that is exonerate Henry VIII’s unfortunate wife of being a witch.
The artist, in fact, he removed the “sixth finger” that Anna was said to have on her right hand. This rumor had been put into circulation by the writer Nicholas Sanders, who in the 16th century fought for the restoration of Roman Catholicism in England and tried to discredit Elizabeth I. The portrait, in this way, it restored dignity to the mother and legitimacy to the daughter.
