Colle, Val de Elsa

Colle di Val d'Elsa is a walled hill town in the upper Elsa valley between Florence and Siena, and Summers had encountered the Tuscan landscape during his travels through Italy in the late 1950s. The print belongs to a sequence of European landscapes from the early 1960s in which he composed terraced hillsides, distant towers, and stacked rooflines as broad areas of saturated color rather than as topographical record. By 1961 his characteristic procedure was beginning to crystallize: blocks inked separately, paper laid face-down so that pigment migrated outward through the fibers of the sheet, leaving every contour with a halo of bleed rather than a hard cut edge. The result lends a Tuscan motif the diffuse atmospheric weight he had previously brought to East Asian subjects. Within his wider body of work the Italian prints occupy the bridge between the more graphic, architectonic compositions of the 1950s and the increasingly luminous landscapes of the later decade.