Monte dei Paschi di Siena

Around about a decade ago, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena was attracting more publicity than the bank probably wanted, mainly due to problems they were having at the time with bad loans and losses. This general view of the bank’s historic headquarters accompanied many of the press articles at the time, but in the intervening years I had forgotten all about this issue. So when I recently stumbled across this building whilst walking around Sienna, it took me a moment or two to realise exactly what I was looking at.

I had originally decided to paint this view in a monochrome watercolour style, but you will have noticed that I ended up using two colours, so it is really a “bichrome“ or “duochrome” painting, not that either of these terms really seems to mean “painting using two colours”. My intention in using a second colour was to emphasise the bank building on the far side of the square, but in retrospect I think I might have used the two colours the wrong way around as the burnt sienna tone has more visual impact than the yellow ochre. However, in real life the bank itself is the plainest building in the square (and no doubt also the oldest building as this is one of the oldest banks in the world), so perhaps on reflection I was correct to do the colours in this way after all!