Portrait of Anne Boleyn

In 1610 a Florentine painter sat down to record a face he had never seen. Anne Boleyn had been dead for almost 75 years by then, beheaded in London in 1536 as the second wife of Henry VIII and mother of the future Elizabeth I. This portrait belongs to a vast Medici project begun under Cosimo I: a gallery of the famous men and women of history, copied and re-copied so that the whole cast of the past could hang along the Uffizi corridors. Anne entered that company as a foreign queen whose story England was still arguing over. With no living sitter for the artist, the likeness leans on earlier images and on reputation, which is why portraits of her from this period rarely quite agree with one another.