The subject
Pienza in the Light
Painters go to Pienza for the light. The little Renaissance town sits on a ridge in the Val d’Orcia, and from the middle of the afternoon its stone turns to honey.
Pienza is built of warm local sandstone and travertine — a pale, faintly golden material that seems to hold the sun. In the flat light of noon it is simply cream; but as the day tips over, the low sun rakes along the lanes and the walls glow ochre and amber, the shadows going a cool violet-grey. It is a town that changes colour by the hour.
The valley below is one of the most beautiful — and most painted — landscapes in Italy. Its rolling clay hills, lone cypresses and scattered farmhouses have stood behind Tuscan pictures for centuries, and in 2004 the whole Val d’Orcia was named a UNESCO cultural landscape: a piece of countryside recognised as a work of art in itself, shaped by people and light.
Away from the perfect central square, Pienza is a handful of quiet lanes. In the early afternoon they empty out — a shutter closed against the heat, a terracotta pot of geraniums in a doorway, a cat crossing a strip of sun. This is the Pienza I wanted: not the monument, but the warmth of an ordinary street at a particular hour.
So the drawing is mostly light. A stone arch and a doorway in quick ink line, the sunlit wall washed in warm ochre, the shaded side left cool and grey, and a single terracotta pot of green to say that someone lives here. The real subject is the sunshine falling across the stone.
Pienza rewards the slow walk and the late hour — when the crowds have gone and the stone is at its warmest. It is a town that seems built, in the end, to be looked at in the sun.
See also · Tuscan Sketchbook
Un ricordo di Pienza ·
Il Vicolo dell’Amore ·
Castello di Meleto
