Rothko in Florence
Palazzo Strozzi
Museo di San Marco e Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, Italy
14 March – 23 August 2026
Mark Rothko’s paintings create a bridge between artist and viewer, establishing a dialogue that transcends subject matter through colour and form alone. This becomes immediately apparent in his retrospective at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, curated by his son Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, bringing together more than seventy works, many never before seen in Italy, from institutions including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Tate Modern.
Florence played a decisive role in Rothko’s artistic development, particularly following his first visit to Italy in 1950. He was deeply moved by the atmosphere of the cells in the Convent of San Marco, frescoed by Fra Angelico between 1438 and 1445. More broadly, the balance, restraint and spiritual intensity of Italian Renaissance art left a lasting impression on his mature practice and his evolving exploration of colour.
This dialogue extends beyond the walls of Palazzo Strozzi and continues in two iconic spaces in the city, namely the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, where Rothko encountered Michelangelo’s architectural vision.
In the main venue, the exhibition traces the key stages of his career. The opening rooms offer a revealing insight into an aspect of Rothko’s practice often overshadowed by his mature colour fields. Here, a series of intimate figurative works, deeply informed by the Expressionist and Surrealist currents of the 1930s, reveals the gradual path that would eventually lead him towards abstraction. As the journey unfolds, forms become increasingly simplified and blocks of contrasting colour begin to dominate the compositions, although they still retain a playful vitality that would later give way to the solemnity of his mature work. A painting such as No. 3/No. 13 (1949) introduces the visual language that would become Rothko’s hallmark: luminous rectangular bands of colour suspended in space.
The following galleries immerse the viewer in colour itself. Warm, radiant canvases such as Untitled (1952-53) envelop the eye in an endless yellow sea, held up by a red base that creates a feeling of deep-rootedness. Rather than overwhelming, the prevailing sensation here is one of quiet joy, of a nourishing yet concentrated vital energy.
Gradually the palette shifts towards cooler, more contemplative tones, as in Untitled (1957), where shades of blue and green invite calm and reflection. It is a moment of pause before works such as Four Darks in Red (1958), in which the artist draws explicit inspiration from the dark, earthy reds of Pompeii, the city he visited on a later trip to Italy. These are visceral paintings that hit you in the gut, leaving the sensation of sinking into the underground tunnels of a mine.
This sense of psychological intensity reaches its fullest expression in the studies for the Harvard Murals and the Seagram Murals, the latter originally commissioned for New York’s Four Seasons Restaurant.
The imposing architecture of the vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, with its sealed windows and oppressive sense of enclosure, proved particularly influential. Rothko himself described the space as evoking a feeling of imprisonment with no possibility of escape, an experience that informed these works. Now painting becomes an architectural presence, capable of shaping the surrounding space. Yet the Seagram Murals were never installed in the Four Seasons Restaurant. Rothko withdrew from the commission, deeming his works unsuited to the atmosphere of an elegant, elite dining room.
In the final rooms, alongside the austere Black and Gray paintings, one can admire the works on paper, continuing his search for an atmosphere of silence, stillness and introspection.
Rothko’s works are to be experienced physically, first and foremost, as they hold a magnetic power to quiet the chatter of the mind. The exhibition gives the works the space to speak for themselves, without excessive interpretation.
As the artist himself believed, painting should speak directly to the emotions without the mediation of words. Faced with his canvases, silence becomes the truest dialogue between artist and viewer. All that is required is a willingness to look and to remain open to the experience.
In an age increasingly defined by speed, distraction and visual overload, the exhibition creates the conditions for a slower, more attentive encounter with painting. It is an experience that lingers long after leaving the museum, carrying with it a sense of stillness that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary.
Photography: Mariano Della Corte.
Planning your visit?
If you’re visiting Florence, you can book tickets for Palazzo Strozzi and explore museums and cultural experiences across Italy.
Leave a Reply