Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun An underlying image in a painting, especially one that has become visible when the top layer of paint has turned transparent with age, providing evidence of revision by the artist.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An alteration in a painting, evidenced by traces of previous work, showing that the artist has changed his or her mind as to the composition during the process of painting.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the reappearance in a painting of an underlying image that had been painted over (usually when the later painting becomes transparent with age)

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Italian, correction, pentimento, from pentire, to repent, from Latin paenitēre.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From Italian pentimento.

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Examples

  • That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind.

    The scandalous Lillian Hellman 2011

  • Would it seem foreign to her, or would she have some impossible memory of the place, a pentimento written in blood and bone?

    FALSE MERMAID ERIN HART 2010

  • Would it seem foreign to her, or would she have some impossible memory of the place, a pentimento written in blood and bone?

    FALSE MERMAID ERIN HART 2010

  • Like a pentimento, New Orleans has long been a canvas repeatedly repainted.

    American Sketches Walter Isaacson 2009

  • His poems are so dense and full of pentimento effects that he has more in common with T.S. Eliot than with Hughes or Larkin.

    2007 July 04 « One-Minute Book Reviews 2007

  • But what surprised me was not the restoration of the old but the advent of the new: the influx of innovators and entrepreneurs and creative young people who were painting, like a pentimento, fresh brushstrokes onto the canvas of New Orleans.

    American Sketches Walter Isaacson 2009

  • His poems are so dense and full of pentimento effects that he has more in common with T.S. Eliot than with Hughes or Larkin.

    Are You Smart Enough to Understand Geoffrey Hill? « One-Minute Book Reviews 2007

  • It's an effect caused by the oil itself, and the effect is responsible for the unintended pentimento you occasionally come across in an old master's work.

    Daybreak Blues James Gurney 2009

  • Such veils would be susceptible to pentimento over time.

    Daybreak Blues James Gurney 2009

  • Has your neighbor canceled her subscription to the local paper and started swiping yours from the lawn at 5 a.m., rapidly doing and frenetically erasing the acrostic and then returning the paper to the lawn at 5: 35 but leaving a telltale pentimento of mostly incorrect answers?

    We'll Tell You When It Hurts 2008

Comments

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  • Odd...this word makes me think of stuffed olives. ;-)

    February 9, 2007

  • the final stage in the life cycle of a palimpsest?

    October 4, 2009