Ghosts of Paintings Past: Pentimenti in Art History
Fragments of the past found just beneath the surface reveal telling details about art and artists…
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:
This is a Baroque oil painting showing the Archdukes Albert (standing at the center left) and Isabella (seated at center) visiting the collection of oddities, paintings, animals, and scientific instruments owned by Pierre Roose (standing slightly behind the two Archdukes). But for our purposes, we want to look more closely at this detail from the lower left of the painting, at this dog:
