Definition of "pentimento" [pentimento]

• An underlying image in a painting, as an earlier painting, part of a painting, or original draft, that shows through, usually when the top layer of paint has become transparent with age. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "That is called pentimento because the painter 'repented', changed his mind."
• "Would it seem foreign to her, or would she have some impossible memory of the place, a pentimento written in blood and bone?"
• "His poems are so dense and full of pentimento effects that he has more in common with T.S. Eliot than with Hughes or Larkin."