Diocletian's Retreat

Diocletian's Palace at Split, on the Adriatic coast, is the late-Roman compound to which the emperor withdrew after his abdication in 305 CE — a fortified residence whose colonnades, peristyle, and substructures still anchor the modern city. Summers' print likely abstracts the site to its principal architectural elements: an arcade, a stepped terrace, perhaps a sliver of sea, set against broad flat fields of colour. The composition would carry the same simplified palette and high-contrast massing seen in his Asian architectural sheets, here turned to a Mediterranean rather than a Himalayan subject. Printed without a press by hand-rubbing the paper above face-up plywood blocks, and finished by spraying solvent through the back of the sheet to draw pigment outward in soft halations, it would render the masonry as warm-toned silhouette held in dissolving light rather than as a documentary view. Diocletian's Retreat sits within Summers' wider engagement with sacred and palatial architecture across cultures — Nepal, India, the Roman Mediterranean — through which he treated built sites in much the same iconic relation to the land as the mountains in his Himalayan prints.