Altamura is a place that rewards looking closely. At its cathedral, the stone lions held my attention longer than the grand outline of the building.
In the old centre of this inland Puglian town, the cathedral gives the streets a point of gravity. Its façade has towers, a rose window and a deeply worked entrance. Yet a painting need not take in all of it. Sometimes a fragment carries more of a place than a wide view.
Where the eye stops
The lions beside the cathedral entrance have the curious presence of carved creatures that have spent centuries among ordinary daily life. Their faces and bodies are architectural details, but they also feel almost like characters. The stone has lost the sharpness it once had; sunlight brings out one edge while the next falls away.
That contrast is what drew me to them. I could have tried to record every carving. Instead I wanted the weight of the forms and the warmth of the surface, with a few dark accents to let the shapes emerge. A restrained palette suits Altamura better than a display of colour for its own sake.
Painting warm stone without flattening it
Pale limestone is seldom one pale colour. A sunlit edge can be almost the white of the paper; a recess can hold ochre, violet-grey or a cooler reflected tone. In watercolour I begin with the larger wash, allowing parts of it to remain quiet. Darker marks then describe the places where one carved plane sits behind another.
Too many outlines would turn the lions into a diagram. I leave some edges unresolved so the forms seem to belong to the façade rather than sit on top of it. The small shifts between warm and cool do much of the work.
View The Lion of Altamura and choose a print →
In The Lion of Altamura, the subject is almost intimate. Lions of the Cathedral places the figures in conversation with one another. They are two ways of remembering the same stop, one concentrated, the other more architectural.
Altamura within the painted journey
The town changes the rhythm of a Puglia journey. The harbour colours of Monopoli give way to inland stone and quieter streets. The carved forms also make an interesting companion to the rock-built city of Matera across the regional border.
Explore the Altamura paintings, or follow the broader journey through Puglia and A Painter’s Guide to Puglia. The lions are a small detail in that larger landscape, but they are the detail that made me stop.