Rothko Comes to Florence: Color Fields Meet the Renaissance

In a small whitewashed cell at Florence’s Convent of San Marco, Fra Angelico’s pale, kneeling Virgin still greets visitors from a 15th-century fresco of the Annunciation. A few steps away, another apparition now shares the space: a hovering expanse of burgundy and black by Mark Rothko, with no figures, no narrative and no frame—only color.

The encounter is part of “Rothko in Florence,” a major retrospective that opened March 14 at Palazzo Strozzi and spills into two of the city’s most charged Renaissance sites. Bringing together more than 70 works by the Russian-born American painter, the exhibition traces his career from early figuration to the late near-monochromes, arguing that his famously abstract canvases are in direct conversation with Florence’s religious and humanist traditions.

Curated by Rothko’s son, Christopher Rothko, and Italian curator Elena Geuna, the show runs through Aug. 23. It is organized by Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi with loans from leading museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Palazzo Strozzi describes the project as “one of the most important exhibitions ever dedicated to Mark Rothko,” conceived specifically for Florence and its Renaissance architecture.

“It’s not just about bringing great paintings here,” Christopher Rothko said in an interview published on opening day. “It’s about bringing them back into contact with some of the spaces and ideas that helped form them.”

A full-career arc in a Renaissance palace

Inside the 15th-century Palazzo Strozzi, the exhibition unfolds chronologically.

Early rooms show Rothko’s experiments of the 1930s and 1940s: small canvases and works on paper populated by mythological figures, animals and biomorphic forms. Influenced by Surrealism, ancient myth and psychoanalysis, these paintings test how archetypes and subconscious imagery might be translated into modern art.

In the late 1940s, the figures dissolve. Forms flatten and begin to float. Works such as “No. 3 / No. 13” (1949), on loan from MoMA, reveal the vocabulary that would make Rothko one of the central figures of Abstract Expressionism: stacked rectangles of color suspended on luminous grounds, their edges softly bleeding into one another.

The palazzo’s symmetrical courtyards and stone-framed doorways provide a backdrop the organizers see as essential. Exhibition texts say Florence’s “classical measure” helps illuminate how Rothko sought a balance between structure and expressive freedom, using color to create a new sense of space that pushes beyond the flat canvas.

As visitors progress, the palette and mood darken. Galleries devoted to the late 1950s and 1960s introduce the Seagram Murals, a series originally commissioned for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building in New York, and preparatory works for the Rothko Chapel in Houston.

These paintings, in deep reds, maroons and blacks, were intended to envelop diners in a somber atmosphere. Rothko ultimately withdrew from the commission, later donating the Seagram Murals to institutions including Tate, where they occupy a dedicated room.

A late section at Palazzo Strozzi focuses on the Black and Grey paintings Rothko made in 1969, shortly before his death in 1970. Vertical bands of near-black and ash divide large canvases with minimal variation, offering an austere counterpoint to the saturated color fields of the previous decade.

The last room contains large-scale works on paper from the late 1960s, mounted on panel and framed together as a single, continuous ensemble. Some echo the Black and Grey canvases; others retreat into barely distinguishable dark tones; still others glow in muted blues, rose earths and terracottas.

Christopher Rothko has called this final room “one work, and my favorite in the show,” describing it as a place where his father’s reputation for severity gives way to a different impression.

“He was known for his intellect,” he said. “But ultimately, he was just a very warm man—a big, big heart. I think you see it in the paintings.”

From Fra Angelico’s cells to Michelangelo’s staircase

The retrospective extends beyond Palazzo Strozzi into a city-wide project.

At the Museo di San Marco, a former Dominican convent managed by Italy’s Ministry of Culture, five Rothko works have been installed among cells frescoed by Fra Angelico in the 1440s. The original cycle, created for monks’ private meditation, includes scenes such as the Annunciation and the Crucifixion, painted in restrained colors on bare plaster walls.

Rothko first visited San Marco in 1950. Exhibition materials say the intimacy and spiritual focus of the cells left a lasting impression on him, particularly the way Fra Angelico used light and color to evoke a sense of transcendence.

By placing 20th-century abstractions in those same cells, curators draw a line between the two artists’ aims.

“Both Fra Angelico and Rothko sought to create images that invite contemplation,” Geuna said in a public presentation of the project. “One uses narrative and figures, the other uses only color, but the aspiration to another dimension—at once distant and very close—is shared.”

A second satellite installation is located in the vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, the library commissioned by the Medici and designed by Michelangelo. The vestibule is famous for its compressed space and theatrical staircase, often described as a key work of Mannerist architecture.

Rothko visited the vestibule during his time in Florence and later cited it as a crucial—if initially subconscious—influence on the Seagram Murals. “Michelangelo achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after,” he said, adding that in the vestibule one feels “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.”

In Florence, two red-and-black paintings associated with the Seagram commission now hang at eye level at the base of Michelangelo’s staircase. Their dense fields echo the weight of the gray stone walls around them, closing a historical loop between the Renaissance architect and the modern painter who adapted his sense of psychological space.

Florence’s strategy beyond the Renaissance

For Florence, the exhibition is part of a broader effort to expand its image beyond that of a static Renaissance capital.

Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, created in 2006 as a public–private cultural foundation supported by the city, the region and private partners including Fondazione CR Firenze and banking group Intesa Sanpaolo, has used major temporary exhibitions to attract what officials call “quality tourism.” Its program has ranged from classical shows to presentations of Marina Abramović, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons and street artist KAWS.

In 2023, the foundation reported about 220,000 visitors and an economic impact of €71 million from its activities. Earlier this year, a joint exhibition on Fra Angelico at Palazzo Strozzi and San Marco became the most visited show in the institution’s history.

“Rothko in Florence” builds on that model, encouraging visitors to move between Palazzo Strozzi, San Marco, the Laurenziana Library and the city’s opera house. On March 21, the Teatro del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino is scheduled to host a performance of American composer Morton Feldman’s “Rothko Chapel,” a 1971 work written for the non-denominational chapel in Houston that houses 14 of Rothko’s paintings. The concert is presented as part of Palazzo Strozzi’s “Fuorimostra” program linking visual art with music and performance.

The foundation has also developed education programs around the show, including workshops for children and a visit kit co-designed with students from Florence’s Liceo Artistico Statale di Porta Romana, a public art high school.

A transatlantic feedback loop

The retrospective arrives more than half a century after Rothko’s death, at a time when his work is firmly established in museum collections and the art market. Yet the Florence exhibition emphasizes not only the painter’s place in American postwar art, but also his debt to older European models.

Born Markus Rothkowitz in 1903 in what is now Latvia, Rothko emigrated to the United States as a child, studied briefly at Yale University and spent most of his career in New York. His breakthrough into abstraction came in the late 1940s; by the 1950s he was exhibiting widely, including at the Venice Biennale.

By rehanging his works in the Renaissance spaces that helped shape his sense of color, scale and enclosure, “Rothko in Florence” presents a reciprocal relationship: American abstraction absorbing Italian precedents, and Florence, in turn, using modern art to reinterpret its own heritage.

In the San Marco cells, Fra Angelico’s quiet narratives continue to unfold as they have for nearly 600 years. Next door, Rothko’s floating rectangles offer no story, only a field in which to project one’s own. In the Laurenziana vestibule, Michelangelo’s staircase still appears to surge forward, while Rothko’s dark panels bring the walls closer.

Together, the pairings suggest that the distance between a Renaissance fresco and a mid-20th-century color field may be shorter than it appears. Both ask viewers to enter a confined space, look longer than they might have planned and find, in paint and stone, a record of inner life.