Painting a Tuscan Facade in Pienza – Osteria Sette di Vino

Pienza is usually associated with broad views across the Val d’Orcia, cypress trees and the geometry of the Tuscan landscape. But while walking through the town, I was equally interested in smaller architectural fragments.

One of them was the facade of Osteria Sette di Vino, on a small side square in Pienza. What stayed in my memory was not the building as a piece of architecture, but its colour and arrangement: the warm cream plaster, almost black shutters, old wooden doors and vegetation spreading irregularly across the wall.

Cropping the photograph into a painting

I painted the work later in the studio using my own photograph as reference. Instead of reproducing the complete view, I moved much closer into the facade and removed most of the surrounding space.

That crop gave me a much stronger composition. Across the 15.7 × 35.4 in (40 × 90 cm) canvas, the three entrances form a sequence of dark vertical shapes, while the pale wall connects the entire painting horizontally.

The central doorway was particularly interesting to paint. The entrance sits deeply in shadow beneath its stone arch, creating one of the darkest passages in the picture. Against it, the surrounding cream wall becomes much warmer and lighter.

Warm walls, dark doors and small accents of colour

The palette is deliberately restrained. Most of the painting is built from warm creams, ochres, browns and muted greys. This makes the relatively small red and pink flowers much more noticeable.

I kept the worn plaster and vegetation loose, allowing individual brush marks to remain visible rather than carefully describing every leaf or crack in the wall. That balance between recognisable architecture and freely handled paint is something that appears throughout my architectural paintings .

Although the subject comes from Pienza, this painting is quite different from my wider Tuscan landscapes. Instead of looking out across hills and fields, the view stops directly at the wall. Architecture itself becomes the landscape.

More works inspired by the region can be found in my collection of Tuscan paintings , while my architecture painting collection includes facades, churches, streets and doorways from Italy and other places I have painted.