A canvas is often a creative palimpsest and artists, both the aspiring and the renowned, had changes of heart for the mood and message of their work. A correction and substitution that can still be discerned, either as ghostly after-images, something liminal to the naked-eye or revealed accidentally through restoration efforts or purposefully through study—dissection, scanning and x-raying goes by the term
pentimento—Italian for something the artist repents over. Mental Floss features a nice
gallery of paintings that embody this phenomena with stories behind the changes, minor and major.
