Rothko in Florence
Palazzo Strozzi, San Marco Museum, Laurentian Library
March 14\u2013August 23, 2026
Florence<\/p>\n
Contemplating painting should be work. The monks of the Convent of San Marco in Florence spent a sizeable portion of their mature lives sitting in their cells staring at Fra Angelico\u2019s frescoes, praying for the salvation of the world, aided in their spiritual labors by those painted images. It is a revelatory gesture to forcibly wrench the modern viewer into a similar frame of mind while looking at the work of a modern master\u2014Mark Rothko\u2014in the medieval location. The statement that the religious devotion of the monastic life is the same devotion necessary to contemporary art, is clear, and this is a great accomplishment. Though Rothko has taken over Florence, at the Palazzo Strozzi and the Laurentian Library, the recalibration to a new, or very ancient, means of observing art begins at the Convent of San Marco.<\/p>\n
Five paintings by Rothko have been placed in five of forty-four cells painted by Fra Angelico and his workshop in the convent (the term \u201cconvent\u201d applies to any cloistered community within the city walls\u2014for men or women). In the first cell, we find the playful Noli Mi Tangere (1440\u201341), in which a dreamy Christ trips the light fantastic in front of a restrained Mary Magdalene, paired with an untitled work from 1958: a thin strip of rosey-red at top, a thin strip of vermillion at bottom, and a pink square dominating the center, all on a background of rich golden yellow. There are resonances between the Magdalene\u2019s coral dress and Rothko\u2019s spectrum of red\/pink tones, but what is most synergistic between the two artists is the use of glowing color as a focus of meditative intensity. This is also true of the golden yellow of the figures\u2019 hair and Rothko\u2019s background, but the notion of traditional complementarity between colors is of less concern than their ability to hold the eye.<\/p>\n
Among the Fra Angelico\/Rothko pairings, all of the combinations have a visceral impact. In the fourth cell, the Crucifixion with the Virgin and Sts. John the Evangelist, Dominic, and Jerome (1439\u201343) is presented next to another untitled work from 1958. Amongst Beato Angelico\u2019s novel color choices, there is the deep blue and black troubled sky behind Christ, the black habit of St. Dominic, and the blood-covered wood of the crucifix, gorgeously matched against Rothko\u2019s horizontal, tripartite arrangement of Payne\u2019s Gray, earth tone, and Payne\u2019s Gray on light gray background. Rothko\u2019s uneven striations recall the five figures and bleak barren landscape of the crucifixion, and the abstract stripes flicker like a mournful Morse code. In the sixth cell, a Transfiguration of Christ (1440\u201342), in which the savior appears in a luminescent mandorla in front of his Apostles is paired with Gethsemane (1944), a surrealist assemblage of forms which features an ovoid figure with a piercing red eye, whose skate-wing-like appendages windmill outwards, mimicking the gravitational pull of Beato Angelico\u2019s Christ figure. Interestingly, Rothko was not the only artist to paint terrifying New Testament-inspired dark, almost demonic, figures in 1944\u2014Gethsemane and Francis Bacon\u2019s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion both feed off of the terror, horror, and ecstasy of miraculous visitation. Rothko would write in his essay \u201cThe Romantics Were Prompted\u201d (1947), that \u201cthe most important tool the artist fashions through constant practice is faith in his ability to produce miracles when they are needed.\u201d It would not be surprising that three years later, when Rothko saw San Marco in person for the first time in 1950, he discovered in Fra Angelico a fellow maker of miracles.<\/p>\n
But the creation of miracles are not the only thing which Rothko seems to have shared, or even intuited from his visits to Florence and Fra Angelico\u2019s frescoes. Heraldry and its strict hierarchies of color, which infuse almost all aspects of medieval painting, and especially Fra Angelico\u2019s stark compositions, are in open dialogue with Rothko\u2019s works on view at the Palazzo Strozzi. The diagrammatic structure of heraldic forms and symbolic color generated a painting style at times as abstract in the eleventh through the fourteenth centuries as Ab Ex was in the 1940s and \u201950s. Rothko in Florence is chronological, so the exhibition begins with the painter\u2019s figurative works, and we are faced with Rothko\u2019s brooding and hunky self-portrait (1936) as we enter the show. It is the small Interior (1936) which presages the later mature abstractions, and also references a vignette of renaissance architecture. It has an ascending tripartite form: green, white, and red, layering the colors in order of importance the same way Vitruvius would rank orders of columns, with green acting as a frequent anchor color for Rothko. The blind seer Tiresias of 1944 is of the same ilk as Gethsemane in San Marco. In the first room of true abstractions, titled \u201cMultiforms, Pre-classic and Early Classic Works,\u201d we see three very similar olive greens leap frog from canvas to canvas, first as an undulating pool in an untitled Multiform from 1948, assuming a vertical rectilinear position in No. 24 (1949), then a chunky central rectangle on a mostly orange and white canvas in No. 11\/No. 20 (1949), and finally evolving into classic Rothko format in the MoMA\u2019s No. 3\/No. 13 (1949). These all predate his visit to Florence: Rothko had already sussed out the entrancing power of hierarchically structuring his colors.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rothko in FlorencePalazzo Strozzi, San Marco Museum, Laurentian LibraryMarch 14\u2013August 23, 2026Florence Contemplating painting should be work. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":335602,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-335601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/335602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}