The Could-Have-Beens
“Saint Paul, Hermit”, Salvator Rosa, Mid-seventeenth-century. Pen and brown and black ink with wash.
Ale Nodarse June 13, 2024
Art has a name for the path not taken: the pentimento.
The word is Italian, and it is usually preserved as such in English. (Although, if you fancy Victorian novels, you might just stumble upon the now demoded “pentiment”). A 1611 English-Italian dictionary provides an initial translation:
Pentimento: repentance, penitency, sorrowing for something done or past.¹
The primary focus is regret. The word’s original context was a religious one: the act of repenting for one’s sins. Outside the religious sphere, however, a pentimento might be described more generically: as the ability within us “to change one’s mind” or “to have a change of heart.”
In analyses of painting and drawing, however, the term took on another meaning. The pentimento came to describe any visible alteration to a work of art: any moment where the artist visibly changed her mind. Drawn pentimenti (the plural form of pentimento) allow us to follow the artist’s process, to trace ideas (half-) formed. With each pentimento, we follow a maze of creative possibility — without the risk of getting lost.
Certain artists capitalized on these marks, turning erstwhile mistakes into a litany of meandering forms. In a drawing of Saint Paul (above), by the Italian artist, actor and poet, Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), the Biblical hermit appears in a state of bewilderment. He is (the trees tell us) in the wilderness, but it’s his flailing arms that signal wild. Looking closely at the drawing, we can follow the artist’s moves: all of those blurred limbs, so many pentimenti, stretching out below the final pair of fully raised hands. The effect is cinematic.
Saint Paul was defined by his repentance. He lived alone in the desert. He survived on crumbs — brought by a raven, the story goes — and prayer.² In Rosa’s image, however, repentance finds another form. The artistic definition comes into play as pentimento changes from sorrow to possibility, from a penitential gesture to a dazzling abundance of could-have-beens: to multiverses in ink.
No doubt, all of these marks could cause confusion. One seventeenth-century critic likened this compositional style to a “mass of sardines in barrel,” or, worse, a “market of maggoty nuts.”³ But a certain beauty, in all its perplexity, resides in this memorialization to the vagaries of journeys, embarked or imagined.
And so, if we allow it, the pentimento asks. Can we still marvel, without regret, at all the paths not taken?
¹Giovanni Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (London: Arnold Hatfield, 1598/1616), 366.
²This was also depicted in images. See, for example, Saint Paul the Hermit Being Fed by a Raven, an oil painting by an anonymous Spanish artist in the Wellcome Collection, London.
³Marco Boschini, The Map of Painterly Navigation (La Carta del Navegar Pitoresco), translated in Philip Sohm, The Artist Grows Old: The Aging of Art and Artists in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 125. Boschini, a Venetian, pointed his critique at artists in seventeenth-century Florence.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
