A Montalcino Tuscan Hills Oil Painting

Under the Tuscan Moon is a large Montalcino Tuscan hills oil painting by Andrea Bocedi, approximately 57×77 cm, inspired by a view near Agriturismo Bellavista, close to Montalcino and Abbazia Sant’Antimo in Tuscany.. I did not paint it directly outdoors. The painting was made later in the studio, from a photograph, but the photograph was only a starting point. What interested me most was not the documentary record of the place, but the light — that strange, quiet, almost impossible light over the Tuscan hills at sunrise.

The title came after the painting was finished. Of course, it is a small humorous echo of the film Under the Tuscan Sun. In my case, the moon was still clearly visible in the painting, so Under the Tuscan Moon came almost immediately to mind. It is not meant as a grand literary title. It has a bit of humour in it, but it also fits the image: a landscape suspended between night and morning, between memory and observation.

Avoiding the Tuscan Landscape Cliché

The view itself was not the typical postcard version of Tuscany. That was important to me. During that trip, I was trying to avoid the most obvious tourist motifs — especially the endless clichés of cypress roads, postcard villas and perfectly arranged Tuscan scenes. There is nothing wrong with those motifs, but they are so often repeated that they can easily become decoration rather than experience.

This view had no cypress trees, and for me that was a strong advantage. It allowed the landscape to breathe differently. The hills became the real subject: their rhythm, their softened edges, their muted but still intense colours, and the way the early light moved across them. It felt less like “Tuscany as an image” and more like Tuscany as a lived moment.

That is what I wanted to keep in the painting.

The most difficult part was the colour. The hills were subdued, almost quiet, but at the same time full of intensity. This is the kind of colour that a camera often fails to understand. A DSLR can capture sharpness, contrast and detail, but it does not necessarily capture how the human eye feels colour in the moment. Especially at sunrise, the eye adjusts, remembers and exaggerates in a different way. The painting had to follow that human experience rather than the mechanical truth of the photograph.

Painting from a Photograph in the Studio

Painting from a photo in the studio always carries a risk. The photograph can become too literal. It can push the painting toward description, and description alone is rarely enough. For me, the photo was useful as structure: the placement of the hills, the direction of the light, the general arrangement of the forms. But the atmosphere had to be rebuilt in paint.

In Under the Tuscan Moon, I wanted the landscape to feel still, but not empty. The moon, the rising light and the broad movement of the hills create a quiet tension. It is not a dramatic landscape in the obvious sense. There is no storm, no spectacular architecture, no theatrical subject. The drama is in the colour and in the transition between darkness and morning.

Montalcino and the area around Abbazia Sant’Antimo have a particular atmosphere. There is history there, but also silence. The landscape does not need to announce itself loudly. It works slowly: distant hills, fields, old roads, soft light, air changing before the day becomes clear. For a painter, this kind of place is more interesting than a perfect postcard view, because it leaves more space for interpretation.

Sunrise Light, Moonlight and Memory of Place

The painting became less about recording a location and more about holding onto a state of seeing. I wanted to paint the feeling of standing before the day fully arrived, when the landscape was still uncertain and the colours were not yet fully separated from the night. That is probably why the moon remained important in the final image. It keeps the painting slightly suspended, not fully morning and not fully night.

This is also why the work is larger than many of my small plein air studies. At approximately 57×77 cm, Under the Tuscan Moon has more space for the hills to unfold. The larger format allowed the landscape to become more immersive, less like a sketch of a place and more like an atmosphere you can enter.

For me, this painting belongs to a group of works about memory of place. The subject is real: Tuscany, Montalcino, Agriturismo Bellavista, the hills near Abbazia Sant’Antimo. But the painting is not only about where the view was. It is about what remained after seeing it — the light, the silence, the muted intensity of colour, and the feeling that no camera could fully catch.

That is often the reason I paint landscapes. Not to prove that I was there, and not to reproduce a photograph, but to rebuild the moment in another language: oil paint, colour, surface, memory and time.