Rothko's Colour Fields Find Spiritual Home in Florence's Renaissance Spaces

A major exhibition in Florence has paired the work of Mark Rothko, the American abstract expressionist, with Renaissance religious art, revealing an unexpected spiritual kinship between the two traditions. According to The Guardian's art critic Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, the exhibition—which takes place at Palazzo Strozzi and two satellite sites and is curated by Rothko's son Christopher and independent curator Elena Geuna—demonstrates how Rothko's colour field paintings provoke a contemplative, almost devotional response similar to that intended by Renaissance frescoes and altarpieces.

Rothko visited Florence for the first time at age 47 and was profoundly moved by what he saw in the city's churches and galleries, particularly the frescoes of Fra Angelico in the cells of San Marco monastery. The exhibition makes explicit what Rothko's later work suggests: that abstract colour, deployed at monumental scale, can function as a form of meditation and spiritual experience. Cosslett describes standing before a large Rothko canvas and feeling tearful—an emotion born not of narrative content but of the painting's capacity to dissolve the viewer's sense of self and provoke what she calls 'awe and wonder.'

For Florence, a city whose global image rests almost entirely on its Renaissance heritage, the presence of contemporary abstract art in dialogue with that heritage represents a deliberate curatorial gesture. It asserts that the city remains a place where art—whether five centuries old or modern—can function as a form of spiritual and intellectual refuge. In an era of mass tourism and digital distraction, the exhibition positions Florence not merely as a museum of the past but as a space where contemplation and aesthetic experience remain possible.