Pentimento
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The presence of traces of a previous work in an artistic or literary work; especially (painting) an image which has been painted over but is still detectable.
"The companion of this picture is the Madonna dressing the Infant, with Joseph planing a board in the back-ground; a performance though inferior in style to the former, not less original from the pentimenti still discoverable in the two principal figures."
- 2 the reappearance in a painting of an underlying image that had been painted over (usually when the later painting becomes transparent with age) wordnet
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"The companion of this picture is the Madonna dressing the Infant, with Joseph planing a board in the back-ground; a performance though inferior in style to the former, not less original from the pentimenti still discoverable in the two principal figures."
Etymology
[Alt: A blue-tinted painting of a man's bent neck, with a faint image of a woman's face in its background] Learned borrowing from Italian pentimento (“repentance, penance, penitence; remorse; change of opinion; correction; traces of a previous image or work in an artwork”), from pentìrsi (“to repent; to regret”) + -mento (suffix forming nouns representing the actions of verbs to which it is attached). Pentìrsi is derived from Latin paenitēre, the present active infinitive of paeniteō (“to cause to repent; to repent; to be sorry, regret”), from Proto-Indo-European *peh₁- (“to hate; to hurt”).
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.