The Rothko Exhibition

The main exhibition occupies the full breadth of Palazzo Strozzi, a fifteenth-century palace whose Renaissance proportions create an unlikely but fitting home for paintings that resist easy containment. All three periods of Rothko's career are represented among the seventy works on display — loans drawn from major collections in the United States and Europe that rarely share the same walls. The architecture itself feels central to the experience: the palazzo's measured stone rhythms set up a productive tension with the expressive freedom Rothko spent decades pursuing. There is something right about standing in a space built on classical geometry while looking at a painting designed to dissolve it.

Fra Angelico & Michelangelo

What makes this exhibition genuinely unusual is the decision to extend it beyond Palazzo Strozzi into two satellite venues, each chosen with care. At the Museum of San Marco, Rothko's works enter into conversation with the fifteenth-century frescoes of Beato Angelico. The pairing sounds unlikely on paper but proves more intuitive than expected — both artists, separated by five centuries, understood colour as something approaching a spiritual language. The second satellite is the Vestibule of the Laurentian Library, designed by Michelangelo and one of the strangest, most compressed architectural spaces in Florence. Here, the tension between classical measure and expressive pressure that Rothko translated into paint finds its architectural equivalent. It is worth visiting for the space alone.

About Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, photo by Henry Elkan, courtesy the Rothko Family Archive.

Born Marcus Rothkowitz in Dvinsk, Russia, in 1903, Rothko emigrated to the United States at the age of ten, eventually settling in New York. He studied at Yale from 1921 to 1923 before relocating to the city where he would spend most of his life. From 1929 onwards he taught at the Center Academy of the Brooklyn Jewish Center, a position he held for two decades. His early work drew heavily on Greek mythology, primitive art, and Freudian psychology; influenced by the Surrealists, he experimented with automatic drawing, producing abstract forms with suggestions of human and animal life. A solo exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery in 1945 marked his formal arrival on the New York scene. By the late 1940s his approach had shifted completely. Figurative references fell away. In their place came the luminous, hovering colour fields that would define his mature work: large canvases of stacked, softly edged rectangles that seemed to breathe. He represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1958, the same year he accepted a commission to create a cycle of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building — a project he ultimately abandoned, donating the works to Tate Modern with the condition they hang together in a dedicated room. His final major commission was a series of fourteen large-format paintings for a non-denominational chapel in Houston, completed between 1964 and 1967 and now known simply as the Rothko Chapel. He took his own life in his New York studio in 1970.

Plan Your Visit

The exhibition runs from 14 March to 23 August 2026. Palazzo Strozzi is open Monday through Wednesday and Friday through Sunday from 10:00 to 20:00, with late opening until 23:00 on Thursdays. Admission is €21.