Word of the day: pentimento

The word of the day is pentimento:

< Italian pentimento repentance, remorse (a1257), change of opinion (1630), correction (a1827) < pentirsi to repent (a1250; < classical Latin paenitēre: see penitent adj. and n.) + Italian -mento-ment suffix.

A sign or trace of an alteration in a literary or artistic work; (spec. in Painting) a visible trace of a mistake or an earlier composition seen through later layers of paint on a canvas. (OED)


"Nothing had prepared me for how one could fix a line merely by rubbing it out and implanting another line a bare thirty-second of an inch above or below.  The choice of the first line could be freely made, unbounded, improvisational.  For you could always erase and remake; the eraser was the best friend a would-be artist had.  And the erased line, still barely visible beneath, had an eloquence of its own, since it smudged the space in a way that suggested pentimenti, second thoughts, a hazy penumbra of light and shadow.  Light leaks into the world, and an erased line with a line above suggests that leakage.  Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser."

 - Adam Gopnik, "Life studies: what I learned when I learned to draw", 27 June 2011 The New Yorker