A painting entirely devoid of pentimenti is likely to be a copy or an outright forgery, though for that very reason adept forgers often employ older paintings as ground for their inventions. Pentimenti reveal alterations made by the painter during the course of his work-most often for purely formal reasons, but sometimes as the result of personal or political motivations. Particularly valuable for stylistic analysis and authentication are the so-called pentimenti-a word based on the Italian penti (to repent) and derived, in turn, from the Latin paenitere (to regret). This typically includes underlying sketches and the consecutive layering of colors with which particular effects have been achieved, as well as corrections, often extensive ones, made during the painterly process. (A Dresden colleague, Alexander Toepler, soon followed suit.) Despite the relative primitiveness of the equipment employed, the heavy concentration of lead in the undercoating of most paintings facilitated the production of strikingly detailed images of the “inner life” of the works being examined, thus offering unprecedented insights into the sheer craft of painting itself. Even more important than what such imaging reveals of an artist’s individual gestus-his handwriting-such imaging may well document the evolution of a composition. The wide-reaching applications of radiography would quickly extend far beyond diagnostics to include geology and meteorology, engineering, botany, biology, art, architecture, archaeology, analytical chemistry, and, in our own day, security technologies. Accustomed as we are to the speed with which information travels in a digital age, it nonetheless seems astonishing that on Valentine’s Day, 1896, only a matter of weeks after the publication of Röntgen’s revolutionary discovery, his technique was applied by the Frankfurt physicist Walter Koenig to the analysis of a painting. Fully aware of the significance of his research, especially for the field of diagnostic medicine, the physicist declined to patent his discovery, in the hope that other researchers would further refine the technique. ![]() That radiograph was exhibited in a public announcement of Roentgen’s discovery on January 24, 1896. (In tribute to its gifted native son and first recipient of the Nobel Prize for physics, Germany prefers to use the term Röntgenstrahlen.) Little more than a month after his initial discovery, Roentgen produced a radiograph of his wife’s left hand, complete with her ill-fitting wedding ring, and mailed the results to several colleagues. Because they were previously unknown, he dubbed these simply “x-rays,” as they are still known today in most of the world. ![]() ![]() On November 8, 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered rays capable of penetrating material and providing an image of structures invisible to the naked eye.
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