Final days to visit Rothko in Florence and explore the influence of Renaissance on his art
This weekend marks the last opening days of one of the most successful exhibitions held at Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi over the last few years: Rothko in Florence. Following on the record-breaking show Fra Angelico, that featured from late September 2025 till the end of January 2026, the Foundation presents a new project exploring the American modern art master’s career and celebrating his special relationship to the city. Curated by the son of the artists, Christopher Rothko, and Elena Geuna, Rothko in Florence is showcased across the main exhibition piano nobile space of Palazzo Strozzi and two special satellite extensions: the Museo di San Marco and the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. The San Marco complex presents a selection of five works featured in the cells with the frescoes of Fra Angelico, while two works are displayed in the Vestibule of the library designed by Michelangelo.
The exhibition itinerary at Palazzo Strozzi unfolds chronologically: in the first section of the show Rothko’s artistic research is retraced from the 1930s and 1940s, when his production is marked by figurative works and influenced by both Expressionism and Surrealism. The following rooms are devoted to the 1950s and 1960s, defined by his celebrated classic colour field large paintings, capable of generating a profound sense of spirituality and pathos. The exhibition features works from major international museums and prestigious private collections, including The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in London, Centre national d’art et de culture Georges-Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC
Mark Rothko visited Florence twice: during his first trip to Italy with his wife Mell in 1950, he visited Fra Angelico’s frescoes at the Convent of San Marco and Michelangelo’s Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana. He was profoundly touched by these encounters, which influenced his later artistic production, including the Seagram Murals painted in the late 1950s. During his second visit to Florence in 1966 Rothko renewed this dialogue with the Renaissance Masters within in work, perceiving a strong spiritual connection with fifteenth-century Italian art and, in particular, of Angelico’s fresco technique.
While in the sublime Angelico’s paintings we admire the minimalist elegance of his manner poised between spiritual and religious devotion and the purity of the visual language, Rothko encapsulates a kindred sense of transcendence into his renowned colour fields large paintings, producing in the visitor the desire to pause and contemplate the depth of his pure colour blocks.
The show section in the Museo di San Marco hosts five small Rothko works, in different media and from different periods, placed in five of the first floor cells (Cells 1, 3, 4, 6, 7) and in direct conversation with the frescos that inspired him so much.
At first glance the criteria for the selection of the works may result a little obvious, as similarities in colour, texture and overall affinity are the guiding principle. However, after a brief pause within the restricted space of the cells, a joint spirit emerges from these juxtapositions, revealing much more than a simple pairing dictated by curatorial choices and unravelling a true and meaningful mystical conversation.
As affirmed by co-curator Elena Geuna in her essay Mark Rothko: The Silence of Colour from the exhibition catalogue: “Transcendence, in the Florentine sense, was found in the careful articulation of the world, in forms of expression that were anchored to physical space while pointing beyond it…Fra Angelico’s frescoes, whether a Visitation, or a Crucifixion, were conceived to open a contemplative space where silence and colour could communicate a truth beyond words. In the stillness of the monastic cells, the frescoes vibrate with ethereal hues of blue, rose, and ochre, hovering at the boundary where the image becomes inseparable from the act of inward contemplation. It was to these rooms that Mark Rothko came more than five centuries later, during his first visit to Italy in the spring of 1950. We can almost picture him, ambling through the halls of the Museum of San Marco, alone in the soft Florentine light, stopping in front of each of Fra Angelico’s frescoes as well as his altarpieces. Before those radiant yet pared-down scenes emptied of spectacle, suffused with tonal restraint, he would have recognized an artistic logic remarkably aligned with his own, where meaning unfolds only through the patience of looking.”
Rothko in Florence
Florence, Palazzo Strozzi
14 March–23 August 2026
