Rediscovering Rothko in Florence
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
More than sixty years after the retrospective held in 1962 at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome, directed by Palma Bucarelli, and over fifty years after the commemorative exhibition at Ca' Pesaro during the Venice Biennale in 1970, the work of Latvian-born American artist Mark Rothko (1903–1970) is returning to Italy - this time in Florence.
The exhibition "Rothko in Florence", curated by Christopher Rothko and Elena Geuna, takes place across a main venue, Palazzo Strozzi, and two highly symbolic sites that are significant to the evolution of Rothko’s painting: the Convent of San Marco, home to frescoes by Renaissance painter Beato Angelico, and the Michelangelo-designed vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana.
These two ancillary venues deserve particular attention to understand the essence of Rothko's work.
While the main exhibition venue successfully assembles pivotal pieces, both on canvas and on paper, from major institutional collections - such as No. 3/No. 13 (1949) from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Four Darks in Red (1958), on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York - as well as notable private lenders like Kenneth Griffin, who owns No. 2 (Blue, Red and Green) [Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue] (1953), in addition to works from the personal collections of the artist’s heirs, Kate Rothko Prizel and Christopher Rothko, the somehow compressed spaces in Palazzo Strozzi do not provide Rothko’s monumental canvases with the breathing room they would require.
In my view, these works would have been enhanced by a more expansive setting, allowing their aniconic power to be fully realized.
The more intimate settings of San Marco and, particularly, of Michelangelo's vestibule in Biblioteca Laurenziana evoke, instead, that strong sense of balance and scale that the artist studied in Florence and tenaciously pursued in his own career. These two locations better facilitate a profound sense of connection with Rothko's work that is both poignant and impressive.
Although Mark Rothko was a reluctant traveler, he was greatly influenced by European art and architecture, particularly that of the Renaissance. The artist visited Florence three times: in 1950, 1959, and 1966. The frescoes of Beato Angelico at San Marco impressed him with their “breathingness,” as he described it, and their capacity to represent both physical and spiritual realms.
Even more influential for Rothko was the Renaissance conception of space.
He noted how Michelangelo’s treatment of the vestibule space in the Biblioteca Laurenziana created a nearly physical sensation of being confined in a room. However, this tension is inseparable from what comes next: Rothko understood that Michelangelo intended this confinement as a prelude to the light of the reading room. Rothko drew deeply from this interplay in his own art. His floating rectangles do not merely occupy the canvas; they expand and press outward, inviting the viewer to engage in a direct experience of the spatial field.
“Rothko realizes”, says his son Christopher Rothko in conversation with Palazzo Strozzi General Director Arturo Galansino, “that the language of the spirit, and the language of installation is not about grabbing you as you walk by in a museum, or making some collector want to buy something. He needs to slow down the conversation, have something that sort of seeps into you slowly, and that's what architecture does. When we're in a space, we can feel uplifted, we can feel hunched over by the scale or the solemnity of the space. It's not something we're even conscious of. Well, he wants to work on that pre-conscious level.”
![Mark Rothko, N.2 (Blue, Red and Green) [Yellow, Red, Blue on Blue] 1953. Kenneth C. Griffin Collection. Photo credit: Barbara Cortina](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/834194_f1324d1abea04a418c4009af560374b5~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_980,h_798,al_c,q_85,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_avif,quality_auto/834194_f1324d1abea04a418c4009af560374b5~mv2.jpg)
