A pentimento is a change of mind that a painter covered up and that later shows through. The artist painted a hat, a hand or a foot in one position, decided against it and painted over it.
Long afterward, the first version comes back into view. Sometimes the upper layer has aged enough to let it through. Sometimes X-rays and infrared cameras see beneath it.
The word is Italian, from the verb pentirsi, to repent or to change one's mind. Its plural is pentimenti.
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A portrait of the king of Spain, painted in the middle of a war, shows how one appears. In 1644, Diego Velázquez, court painter to Philip IV, followed his master on a campaign against Catalonia, the region around Barcelona, then in revolt against the crown.
Philip set up his headquarters in Fraga, a town in Aragon a few miles from the front. There, in a dark, makeshift studio, he sat for Velázquez three times.
The portrait, now in a New York museum, the Frick Collection, shows the king in crimson and silver, a white baton in one hand and a black hat in the other. Velázquez first painted the hat lower, slanting across the body, then raised it.
The left hand and the sleeve had to move with it, so the painter adjusted them too. He covered every abandoned version, and the cover held while the paint was fresh. Nearly four centuries later, some of those first positions show through without any X-ray.
Paint that turns transparent
Why would a covered hat come back?
What You'll Discover
What X-rays and infrared see under the surface.
What van Eyck changed in the Arnolfini couple.
Where Pontormo turned two feet.
Why Sargent repainted a strap after the Salon.
How a correction tells an original from a copy.