pentimento
/ˌpɛntəˈmɛntoʊ/
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.11 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
7
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
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.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "She thought of the painting in the shop, the pentimento. Her life, the one she had so carefully planned for herself had crumbled like the paint on the surface."
- "[T]he presence of a pentimento is an extremely valuable entity which supports the conclusion that a painting is an original composition – so, by inference, therefore, refuting any later suggestion that the painting could be the work of a copyist, who would have been engaged upon copying an existing painting as seen! The identification of a pentimento in an artwork can occur in one of two ways: by analytical interrogation of the subsurface using penetrative radiation such as IRR or XRD, or by direct visual observation, where the overlaying paint has worn away […]"
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”).
Origin
- Source language: Latin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˌpɛntəˈmɛntoʊ/
- British English: /ˌpɛntɪˈmɛntəʊ/