Rothko in Florence Finds a New Way to Read Mark Rothko
Florence is giving Mark Rothko a different kind of afterlife. At Palazzo Strozzi, the American artist’s canvases are not simply assembled for display; they are placed in direct conversation with the city’s Renaissance architecture and painting, from the hushed cells of Museo di San Marco to the Michelangelo-designed vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
The exhibition, Rothko in Florence, spans three venues and gathers 70 works from private collections and major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, Tate, and the Centre Pompidou. Co-curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, it traces how Florence — and, more broadly, the Italian Renaissance — shaped the artist’s thinking about color, space, and emotional force.
The installation at San Marco is among the show’s most persuasive arguments. Five Rothko works hang near Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the former Dominican convent, where the rooms were designed for quiet contemplation. Seen there, Rothko’s fields of yellow, red, blue, and brown do not feel merely abstract. They seem to gather the same spiritual charge that animates the frescoes, as if both artists were trying to slow the viewer’s breathing.
The effect is even more compressed in the Laurenziana vestibule, where two 75cm by 55cm studies for the Seagram Murals are installed in a space Michelangelo made famously severe. Their black vertical forms against bright red echo the architecture’s narrow, enclosing rhythm. Rather than illustrating influence in a straightforward way, the pairing shows Rothko thinking spatially — using painting to alter the viewer’s bodily experience of a room.
That idea runs through the exhibition’s broader arc. Rothko first visited Italy in 1950 with his wife, Mell, when he was still nearly penniless. He encountered the Roman Forum, the preserved ruins of Pompeii, and Giotto’s frescoes in Padua, experiences that later fed into his unfinished book, The Artist’s Reality. The logic of enclosure and atmosphere also helps explain the Rothko Chapel in Houston, completed posthumously in 1971 with 14 dark canvases installed inside.
The show arrives with the confidence of an institution used to ambitious projects. Palazzo Strozzi had only recently closed a major Fra Angelico exhibition, and Rothko in Florence extends that dialogue between historical art and contemporary vision. After the 2023 retrospective at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the question might have been whether another large Rothko survey was necessary. In Florence, the answer is less about quantity than placement: the city reveals how deeply Rothko understood painting as an architecture of feeling.
