Pigments + Penance
“There are layers to everything, even our memories. Over time, the foundations become buried.”
‘Pentiment’ is the English variation of an Italian word, pentimento, which (Wikipedia, don’t lead me astray) translates to ‘repentance’. In the context of painting, it refers to the visual clues that hint at a finished work of art’s previous versions, which are simultaneously covered up and preserved by the final layers of paint. In this way, the word pentimento is in conversation with the word palimpsest, which refers to a related, but not identical, occurrence in which faded documents are written over with new information.
My partner A and I use the word palimpsest as a shorthand for a story in which the truth is overwritten: piled indistinguishably with other truths, hidden to suit the present, or simply forgotten, buried under something new. We pair palimpsest with lacuna, a gap where the truth is missing, if it was ever known.
We attempt to classify stories as palimpsest stories or lacuna stories. Does the protagonist sift through a metaphorical midden to bring something to light? Or are they orbiting a black hole, their lives steered by something missing or unknown? Is there an overabundance of possibility, or an absence? The point isn’t the categorization itself, but to talk about how the characters interact with each other and their world, and in doing so, better understand what makes the story work.
Obsidian Entertainment’s illuminated manuscript-inspired murder mystery video game Pentiment, like many cosmic mysteries, relies on both. Spoilers (and lots of running around town) ahead.
The game begins with an unseen hand in the player’s control, holding a smooth, round stone tool over a page of a medieval illuminated manuscript. This hand uses the tool to scrape the ink from the page, obliterating the words and images on the vellum. (There will be other unseen hands, outside of the player’s control.) The images on the successive pages of the opening credits are only familiar once you know the story of Andreas Mahler—a story that seems to be in danger of disappearing.
Andreas Mahler is a journeyman artist temporarily residing in Tassing, Bavaria, in 1518. He assists the monks in the scriptorium of nearby Kiersau Abbey while working on his literal masterpiece, the work of art that will allow him to be recognized as a master of his craft by a guild. Some details of his life before Tassing are up to the player (I was advised to choose an interest in the occult, since that would make it easier to talk about some really weird stuff with the locals).
No matter what the player chooses, there are constants: he’s a 16th century college dropout, having attempted to seek a different vocation despite, or perhaps because of, his love for art. He has a fiancée he’s never met, named Sabine. In Tassing, he lives with the peasant Gertner family, and has developed a meaningful friendship with his defacto mentor, elderly Brother Piero.
The game begins as Andreas complains about how he’s getting in trouble for talking too much to Piero. He’s not complaining to the other monks or his acquaintances in town, but with characters in a labyrinthine city that Andreas regularly visits in dreams.
Dreams are key to many cosmic mysteries. Dreams are where characters encounter the problems of their waking lives, manifested into the nonliteral forms that more completely depict their impact. Dreams are where characters seek guidance, or perhaps, it’s better to say that characters prove themselves to be the sort to seek guidance from dreams, rather than the other sources available to them.
At the time and place in which Andreas is living, Christianity is the context in which many individuals’ questions of meaning are asked and answered. It’s through Christianity that many contemplate their place in the larger world, or that feelings of cosmic insignificance or dissonance are put to ease. A mystery in which the investigators interrogate the boundaries of Christianity and its authority in a community can only be cosmic.
The four characters that Andreas consults in dream (and who guide what he says and thinks in waking) are Prester John, Beatrice, Saint Grobian, and Socrates. At first, it seems that Socrates is the lone exception in a pack of Christian figures, but it turns out that Socrates is unique in that he’s real.
Socrates is—well, Andreas certainly studied some Socrates at university. Prester John is a figure of myth, the ruler of an unreal kingdom to the nebulous ‘East’, an island of Christianity amid other faiths. Beatrice could refer to Dante’s guide through Paradise in his Divine Comedy, based on but not an exact representation of the author’s lifelong love Beatrice Pontinari. Considering her decorous guidance, particularly in navigating the dynamics of Kiersau Abbey, she’s likely a representation of a legendary nun who deserted her convent for the love of a man and later returned to find that the Virgin Mary had pretended to be her the entire time so that she could come back to the convent without punishment. Given the strangenesses of the mind, there’s nothing stopping her from being comprised of both. Saint Grobian is a fictional saint of rude behavior found in the 1494 satirical poem Das Narrenschiff, or Ship of Fools—the vessel Andreas rides back to the waking world.
The four represent the pop culture intake of one university-educated Christian man of this time, and establish that the figures who populate cultural Christianity are of disparate sources and influences.
This is a crucial moment for Christianity in Tassing. For a long time, Tassing’s visitors have primarily been pilgrims visiting the shrine of Saint Moritz, whose preserved hand once grasped the Holy Lance, and whose travels through Tassing were aided by a local Saint Satia (though it must be said that the bas relief of St. Satia looks quite Roman).
It's 1518! Tassing might have been built on Roman ruins, the older generations might cling to the ancient pagan myths at the heart of their seasonal festivals. But the Druckers run a printing press and most of the townspeople are literate, with unprecedented access to ideas from outside of their community. When outsiders come to town, they want to tempt the monks into idle chatter, or debate the arguments of Martin Luther, or share their pet theories on Lucifer’s true nature. If the foundations of Christianity are up for debate, then what’s to become of the authority—and livelihoods—of institutions like Kiersau Abbey, or individuals like Father Thomas, who runs the town church and cares for anchoress Sister Amalie?
Tassing is visited by a baron who has come to Kiersau Abbey to check on a commissioned manuscript and deliver a tome of forgotten local history, Historia Tassiae, to the abbot. After he sees Brother Piero’s slow progress, he asks for Andreas to finish his commission instead. Soon after, Brother Piero discovers the baron’s dead body. He is blamed for the murder, which prompts Andreas to conduct his own investigation in order to find the real killer.
The only direct clue is a scrap of paper on which a warning is written in a particularly fine—but unidentifiable—hand in violet ink. Andreas discovers a book in the library written in the same hand, implying it was more-or-less recently produced at a nearby scriptorium, but he’s unable to pursue this clue further.
(Un)luckily, the baron was a terrible guy, so there’s several suspects for Andreas to investigate instead. There’s not enough time, though, for him to look into everyone before the archdeacon arrives to pass judgment on the crime.
This happens to Andreas twice. Andreas visits Tassing several years later, to find the community on the verge of revolt. The abbey has been bleeding the town dry with its taxes, and Andreas’ old friend Otto Zimmermann has been agitating for peasants’ right, distributing pamphlets with the help of Claus Drucker’s printing press.
When Otto is found murdered, Andreas once again gets put on a timer and searches for the killer. (This time around, his only dream guide is Melencolia, named after a Dürer engraving possibly depicting a loss of artistic inspiration, mirroring Andreas’ growing artistic barrenness.)
Both times, the time limit means the player has to prioritize speaking to whoever they already kind of suspect—though I’m not convinced it’s possible to know for sure even if Andreas had time to follow every lead. Nobody ever says anything outright self-damning, because why would they? Half the time, the conversation only solidifies the unlikelihood of their guilt. The player gets cornered into naming someone maybe because they think they did it, but also maybe because that person just sucks, or they’re a convenient sacrificial lamb to ease tensions between the town and the abbey, maybe even some perverse calculation of whose death would bring the least consequential repercussions down on any one family.
In both cases, Andreas is pretty sure the person who committed the crime was spurred into the act by whoever is leaving the warnings in violet ink, and in neither case does he learn for sure if the person he accused was guilty. It’s this uncertainty, among other sadnesses, that drives him to a painful death when the abbey library catches fire.
Some years later, Claus Drucker has been tasked with painting a mural in the town Rathaus. He is determined to depict the history of Tassing, including Otto’s failed uprising. Some members of the council, like Father Thomas, aren’t so enthusiastic about the subject matter.
Claus is attacked, and his daughter Magdalene (now the game’s protagonist) finds a violet-inked warning in a beautiful, unknown hand. Magdalene decides to complete her father’s mural before he dies from his injuries. Her investigation is, therefore, not into the identity of her father’s attacker, but into Tassing’s past. She divides the mural into four sections, each representing a particular time period, then goes around town, asking various people what they know about Tassing’s history and interpreting re-assembled ancient pottery.
One of the people she speaks to is Father Thomas, who tells Magdalene the story behind the church’s name, Our Lady of the Labyrinth, hoping she will find the subject interesting enough to include in the mural. (I wonder if Andreas’ dream city was always surrounded by a labyrinth, or if it only appeared—or made sense to him—once he came to Tassing.)
It's Magdalene’s historical investigation, not Andreas’ murder mystery, that finally flushes out the murderer. She puts together that the story of St. Moritz is an updated version of a local Roman myth, which is in turn an updated version of a pagan legend. In other words, St. Moritz never visited Tassing, and certainly never left his hand there or
As her father’s condition worsens, Magdalene discovers that Andreas has lived as a hermit in the charred ruins of the abbey all these years, fixated on grief and the unsolved mystery. They find a Roman temple beneath the church, and discover that Father Thomas was the unseen hand that pushed others into committing murder.
Father Thomas, living deep in the Alps and surrounded by ancient history, felt that Tassing needed its connection to Christianity via the relic of Saint Moritz in order for the faith to flourish. Everyone who Father Thomas murdered possessed evidence that the story of Saint Moritz was untrue.
While he reveals his motive, and the larger complications of his plan, such as who wrote the messages (the anchoress Sister Amalie, who was once a scribe in another town before the people there accused her convent of being witches) he never says which townspeople he pushed into actually committing the murders. Andreas never finds out if he committed innocent people to death.
In the Great Courses audiobook I’ve been listening to, The Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction, educator David Schmid refers to Umberto Eco’s book The Name of the Rose as an Italian ‘anti-mystery’, in which the solution is ambiguous or outright absent. The ending of Pentiment seems to be influenced by, or maybe an homage to, The Name of the Rose, which similarly features a monastery murder and Christian cosmic vibes.
Magdalene is an overworked young woman, running the print shop and taking care of her father and deciding whether or not her future is even in Tassing. The time she is given for her investigation, like Andreas, is restricted. In a reversal of Andreas’ situation, she must choose from all the things she can reasonably assume to be true, to pick one subject for each time period represented by a panel of the mural. It’s not that the truth cannot be known, it’s that it cannot all be shared, at least, not here.
Remember the lacuna and the palimpsest: missing truth versus obscured truth. Andreas Mahler’s mystery is a lacuna, defined by an invisible puppeteer pulling the strings. Magdalene Drucker’s mystery is a palimpsest, defined by sedimentary layers of history and forgetting.
Why do cosmic mysteries often contain both a lacuna and a palimpsest?
I think it’s because it’s more enjoyable to leave something unanswered. Usually, that’s the big cosmic thing. For example, in last month’s book, Piranesi, the true nature of the House goes unexplained (though a character attempts an explanation), but the reader solves the mystery of how the protagonist came to the House. In Pentiment, it’s the particulars that are left unknown, even after the larger plots and greater secrets are brought to light.
Something always gets left out of the historical record, forgotten, or buried. As Andreas and Magdalene showed, it’s impossible to talk to everyone and preserve everything. But as Father Thomas learned, you can’t trust the truth to stay buried, either. The past is always in danger of being forgotten, but it’s always in danger of being remembered, too.
In any case, justice for Otto.
NEXT MONTH
Thank you, everyone, for your continued curiosity in this weird genre experiment. If you haven’t already, please subscribe, and if someone you know also loves strange mysteries, please let them know they’re very welcome here at the Cosmic Mystery Club.
Spooky season is always a little uncanny here in Phoenix, where autumn is my anti-spring, and falling temperatures mostly conjure relief and a renewed enthusiasm for going outside into the sun. I really have to work for that Halloween shiver, and I’m keen to end my movie-watching dry spell. So next month, we’ll indulge in a mystery tinged with a little cosmic horror in The Empty Man. See you then.