It exists within a precious collection of drawings of Tudor court members by the masterful artist Hans Holbein the Younger, now held by the Royal Collection Trust.
Many modern art historians, such as Dr Bendor Grosvenor, accept the label on this drawing is correct and that it is a surviving contemporary likeness of her.
But there is a counter argument, which claims it was mislabelled.
Despite these opposing theories, what is widely believed, based on written evidence, is that the collection of Holbein drawings does indeed contain a portrait of Anne Boleyn – somewhere.
Enter facial recognition: can it resolve the debate, pulling out the true image from the collection, with no human bias and by ignoring existing labels?
It is a technology that isn’t without controversy and is already used in things like unlocking your phone, passport control, and some police investigations – via photographs and footage.
“What we are looking at is a bunch of drawings, and then we are comparing these drawings through a machine-learned algorithm,” Prof Hassan Ugail of visual computing at the University of Bradford explains.
A computer system took all the digital copies of drawings in the Holbein collection and compared each one to the next in turn, looking for and comparing key facial features to see if it could fish out the correct sketch of the doomed Tudor queen.
The Royal Collection Trust, who hold the collection, was not involved with, and does not endorse the findings, but does welcome the study of its artworks.
