Nowadays we can use all sorts of techniques to look down through layers of paint to discover what lies underneath a painting. As I showed when discussing the National Gallery of Art’s recent Vermeer exhibition, techniques like x-rays can reveal how artists changed compositions in their paintings. But, did you know that sometimes you don’t need to use an x-ray to see beneath the layers of paint? Sometimes, forms made in the lower layers of a painting show through, leaving visible what Art Historians call a pentimento (plural, pentimenti).
Let’s take a look at an example from one of the local collections in my area: