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In painting, a paren=left; from the verb , meaning 'to repent'; plural pentimenti) is "the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over". Sometimes the English form "pentiment" is used, especially in older sources.
Some pentimenti have always been visible on the final painting with careful inspection; others are revealed by the increasing transparency that some paint acquires after several centuries. Others, especially in the underdrawing, can only be seen with modern methods such as and infrared reflectography and photographs. These are able to record photographically some , depending on their chemical composition, which remain covered by later paint layers. For example, white lead, a common pigment, will be detected by X-ray, and carbon black underdrawings can often be seen with great clarity in infra-red reflectograms. These methods have greatly expanded the number of pentimenti art historians are aware of, and confirmed that they are very common in the works of many , from Jan van Eyck onwards.
Pentimenti are considered especially important when considering whether a particular painting is the first version by the original artist, or a second version by the artist himself, or his workshop, or a later copyist. Normally, secondary versions or copies will have few if any pentimenti, although this will not always be the case, as in The Lute Player by Caravaggio. Like Rembrandt, Titian and many other masters, Caravaggio seems rarely to have made preliminary drawings but to have composed straight onto the canvas. The number of pentimenti found in the work of such masters naturally tends to be higher.
Marks revealing a totally different subject, for example in The Old Guitarist by Picasso, are not usually described as pentimenti – the artist has abandoned his "earlier composition" to begin a new one. In cases where a composition has been changed by a later painter or restorer, marks showing the original composition would not be described as pentimenti either; it must be the original painter who has changed his mind.
Evidence of pentimenti may also help experts determine that the work was not created by a copier or forger since they are more likely to reproduce the original without making changes.
Several examples by Leonardo da Vinci can be found in his Salvator Mundi, which was sold to a private collector for more than $450 million at Christie's. In particular the pose of Christ's right thumb was altered.
A work by Caravaggio, The Cardsharps has a number of typical minor pentimenti, altering the position of the figure on the right, which are revealed by infra-red reflectograms. These are used in discussing the painting and comparing it to another version of the subject in Bari.
Zurbarán's "Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth" shows that the size of a white cloth was expanded after the dark background underpainting had been applied; the expanded area is a darker white.
An example by Rembrandt can be found in his 1654 portrait Flora.the painting; this is not to be confused with Rembrandt's other Floras. The painting depicts the Roman goddess of spring, thought to be modelled on his deceased wife Saskia Rembrandt, and has elements of pentimento, in a double hat brim where the artist overpainted.
In 2016, as a result of the discovery of pentimenti after conservation and cleaning, the Courtauld Institute changed its opinion on its version of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe from that of it being a copy to it being a preparatory painting that predates the version in the Louvre. Pentimenti were visible once the old varnish was removed, including alterations to the curve of the back of the female nude and one of the male figures' cap, suggesting that the Courtauld picture is a preparatory work.Martin Baily, "London version of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe predates the bigger picture in Paris", The Art Newspaper, 26 Nov 2016.
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