Finding + feeling: “Rothko in Florence” at Palazzo Strozzi, 2026-03-30

Space was as a crucial factor for Mark Rothko, maybe more important even than colour. He constructed his own pictorial infinity within canvases that could be as huge as stage curtains. “I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous,” he explained in 1949. “The reason I paint them…is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human… However you paint [a] larger picture, you are in it.” At the major survey of the artist’s career at Palazzo Strozzi (and two adjunct venues, Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana), visitors are immersed in that space—and witness the luminous energy that makes Rothko a great painter.

Ph. Marco Badiani

Mark Rothko knew Italy and admired its antiquity. In summer 1959, stopping at Pompeii during the second of his three tours to the country, he told his travelling companions he felt a “deep affinity”. In the murals in the House of Mysteries, he recognised the same broad expanses of sombre colour of his own painting.

Rothko’s mature style is one of the most familiar in modern art. Soft-edged, stacked rectangles appear to hover in colour-drenched vertical paintings that create a compelling sense of vibration, breath, life and depth. They seem to occupy an ethereal world separate from our own, defining abstraction as non-objective and “other”. But Rothko rejected the idea that his paintings were purely abstract compositions. Instead, he sought a universal language that engaged with the great existential questions.

Indeed, in 1957 he stated: “I am interested in expressing the basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, comedy, doom and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with these basic human emotions. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you are moved by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.”

To achieve his ambition, he often turned to historical and mythical iconography. He was fascinated by mythology and religion, and even before setting foot again in the Europe he had left as a ten year old in 1913, fleeing to the U.S. from the antisemitic pogroms of his native Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), his earliest compositions echoed Old Masters, such as Titian, the great colourist.

When he visited Florence for the first time in 1950, he was captivated by its great monuments. None was more spellbinding for him than Fra Angelico’s 15th-century frescoes in the monks’ cells at San Marco. Each image was an invitation to prayer and reflection through the media of colour, form and narrative. That is why, for the duration of this exhibition, some of these cells host work by the great American. One of the canvases is titled No. 21 (Untitled) (1947), placed alongside Fra Angelico’s Mocking of Christ (1440–42). Between them is the room’s window giving onto the real world of natural phenomena.

Rothko Palazzo Strozzi ph. Marco Badiani Made during the essential transitional decade when Rothko moved from figuration to a non-representational pictorial vocabulary, based on colour, shape and, above all, space, his painting comprises numerous loosely shaped chromatic patches. It looks a little like a work by Bonnard with the descriptive outlines of a room or garden removed to leave only their colours. One of Rothko’s so-called Multiforms, it marks the moment when he hit upon the way to project a sensation of brilliant colour as the source of light. That first visit to Florence consolidated by direct experience the perceptions he had already developed of the transcendental powers of Renaissance art.

Rothko the man is remembered as brooding and troubled, a victim of the prejudices that pursued the Jewish nation assailed by his own psychological traumas. He was also very intelligent and his painting, almost until his last years and his tragic death by suicide, pulsates with life. He was admitted to Yale University. Finding the atmosphere conservative and, for a West Coast Jew (his parents settled in Oregon), exclusionary, he dropped out when his first-year scholarship was not renewed. Rothko was motivated by philosophical and aesthetic ideas found in the pages of Kant, Kierkegaard and Freud. Books were also a source for the art history that fed his creative imagination to the end. Soon after arriving in New York in 1923, he began to paint. Regular visits to the Metropolitan Museum became a routine.

Already in the late 1930s, Rothko’s writing reveals his fascination with early Italian painting, particularly with Giotto. He was especially interested in the Gothic master’s ability to organise space with a tactile quality by means of colour value. Space is not a void, but seems to have physical substance, a kind of solidity. Rothko built upon that lesson so that, by the late 1960s, images are stripped down to spare form and dense colour. They imply their own narrative drama. Space has become emotional feeling.

Once in Florence, Rothko was able to admire Renaissance works in situ. That included the architecture of Michelangelo, especially the vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.

“He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after,” Rothko later wrote about Michelangelo. “He makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.”

The installation now of two works on paper in wine-dark reds and maroons in that lobby is not mere commemoration. Commissioned in 1957 to create murals for the new building in New York for drinks brand Seagram, Rothko was inspired by the vestibule’s immense blind windows and bold carved frames. These images are studies: the window-like grey form leads the eye to the dark red centre, where a soft light seems to burn like embers.

The Seagram project ended badly (for Seagram). However, Rothko’s ultimate rejection of the commission two years later—he had a fear of commerce and commodification—is central to the Rothko legend. He subsequently donated the nine canvases he made to London’s Tate because of his admiration for Turner, the great 19th-century British Romantic painter and watercolourist. Interestingly, though, Rothko referred to the series of big, unframed paintings as “murals”. In his mind will have been the Renaissance examples he knew by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, for example, or Giotto in Padua.

How, then, to reconcile these richly detailed cycles, teeming with incident, with Rothko’s stripped down, intense but reductive constructions, which seem the essence of modernism? To arrive at that point, he had served his apprenticeship in numerous styles. The first room of the exhibition shows him strongly influenced by the School of Paris, German expressionism and by his mentor, Milton Avery. One critic said Avery occupied “a world in which reality is solely optical”. That attitude influenced Rothko deeply, as did his use of colour and flattened form, and his devotion to Matisse’s achievements.

Rothko Palazzo Strozzi ph. Marco Badiani The impact is revealing. In a small and loosely painted interior scene from 1932, Rothko depicts etiolated figures dwarfed by the lofty surroundings of an unidentified stately chamber. Some peer with uncertainty at the spaces that enclose them, others are clearly impressed by their magnificence. It is possible to sense, in these claustrophobic scenes of urban life, a preoccupation with architectonic space within the picture. It exists in parallel with the perceived risk of being smothered by surrounding circumstances, in which it is tempting to see Rothko’s ever-present personal anxieties.

The familiar, feather-edged “stacked” rectangles of luminous colour followed in 1949. These compositions now define Rothko. Placed symmetrically on vertical, the horizontal cloud-like blocks in contrasting or complementary hues exist within an opaque coloured ground. One of the earliest examples, No. 3/No. 13 (1949), has the luminosity of stained glass. At the same time, it broods in gorgeous melancholy. The black shape appears both to push down upon the forms below and to rise up the canvas. The elements cannot be plotted in space; are they in front of or behind the surface?

Yet the viewer is pulled into the space of the painting. One room immerses the visitor in reds and yellow. The joyous No. 13 (White, Red on Yellow) from 1958 is built on thin layers of oil paint. Rothko would then mix in a variety of media to create variations of texture and sheen, of matte and gloss. By comparison, the “hovering” shapes that lie on the surface are laden with paint and feathered brushstrokes complicate thoughts of depth and space. As one contemporary observer noted, Rothko “could set two reds together in a manner that would make your teeth chatter”.

With all its historic and theological associations with the spirit of existence, coloured light seeps from the body of the compositions. As if to convince us, the galleries are dimmed, coaxing out the chromatic glow.

It is hard to look at Rothko’s large late paintings without emotion. After all, Rothko draws out the direct response of the viewer. A great figure in the Romantic tradition, that light was dimmed and rekindled amid the heavy throb of maroon canvases. Their toned-down character was partly the artist’s way of avoiding the charge of being decorative. In the years before his suicide in 1970, he produced a large series of dark paintings, made up of opaque, monochromatic greys, browns, blues and blacks. Most of which were executed on paper with acrylics, like the monumental Untitled (1969). With American materialism at his highwater mark, Rothko was “seeking the sacred in the secular world”. Do these last pieces indicate that his hopes were extinguished? Maybe. But even in those dark days, it is possible to view them as a beginning, as the start of something new.