Puzzled by Mark Rothko's captivating color field paintings? Look to the Renaissance masters who inspired him

When Mark Rothko traveled to Florence in 1950, he had a lot on his mind. His mother had recently died, and his wife, Mell, was pregnant with their first child. At age 46, he was looking for teaching jobs, and his art was generating only meager profits.

One day, he slipped inside the vestibule of the Laurentian Library, which Michelangelo had designed in the 1520s. A heavy staircase dominates most of the small room’s square footage, and the high walls are decorated with rectangular outlines that suggest blocked doorways.

He was impressed by how deftly Michelangelo had designed the space to evoke a feeling of claustrophobic tension. Several years later, Rothko started painting the Seagram Murals, a series of large canvases filled with dark, oppressive shades of red and black. He hoped the paintings, like the vestibule, would make viewers feel trapped.

Now, two studies for the Seagram Murals are hanging inside the room that inspired them. This display is part of “Rothko in Florence,” an exhibition spotlighting the American artist’s relationship with the Italian city. More than 70 artworks are on view across three locations: the Laurentian Library, the Museum of San Marco and the Palazzo Strozzi.

Rothko is best known for his color field paintings, large-scale canvases featuring stacks of monochromatic rectangles. The idea of museumgoers standing before his canvases struggling to understand what they’re looking at has become something of a cliché.

The artist’s works “challenge us to make sense of what we see, perhaps through the rather indirect avenue of what we feel,” Christopher Rothko, the artist’s son and a co-curator of the show, writes in the exhibition catalog. Although Rothko rarely left his studio, Italy was “a special case,” Christopher adds. “It was the one place my father was not reluctant to travel to, and when he was not there it continually fired his imagination.”

At the Palazzo Strozzi, Rothko’s paintings are displayed in chronological order, beginning with his figurative works from the 1930s and ’40s, before his trips to Europe. One of the paintings on view is Interior, which may have been influenced by Michelangelo’s New Sacristy mausoleum—“a place Rothko could have only seen from photographs,” per the Art Newspaper’s James Imam. The exhibition traces Rothko’s transition to abstraction in the 1950s and ’60s, when he created his iconic color field paintings. Visitors will see famous Rothkos on loan from museums around the world.

At the Laurentian Library, museumgoers will learn about the Seagram Murals, Rothko’s first major commission. In 1958, the artist agreed to create paintings for the walls of a Four Seasons restaurant in New York’s Seagram Building. “I accepted this assignment with strictly malicious intentions,” he later explained. Rothko, like Michelangelo, wanted viewers to “feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up.” But after painting 30 pieces, he decided to return the money, convinced that “anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kind of prices will never look at a painting of mine.”

In 1964, two Houston philanthropists commissioned Rothko to create paintings for a new, non-denominational place—named the Rothko Chapel—that would provide “respite and reflection in a chaotic world.”

“He tries to make these spaces as intimate as possible and have you surrounded by the artwork and really sort of lose yourself in that kind of space, much as you do on a smaller scale in San Marco,” Christopher tells the New York Times’ Elisabetta Povoledo. Unlike patrons of the Four Seasons restaurant, visitors would enter the chapel hoping to be moved.

Finally, San Marco presents Rothko’s work alongside the murals by Fra Angelico that decorate the walls of the former monastery. When the artist visited, he was so captivated by the religious paintings that he returned the following day. The murals are located inside the friars’ cells, providing smaller spaces for reflection.

By placing Rothko’s paintings beside them, the exhibition highlights “not only a subtle shared visual language, but their strikingly similar rationale,” writes the Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett. “Rothko spoke of a painting being an experience, and believed in the importance of its quiet contemplation.”

“Rothko in Florence” is on view at the Palazzo Strozzi, the Laurentian Library and the Museum of San Marco through August 23, 2026.

This article was originally published on Smithsonian Magazine. Read the full story here: Puzzled by Mark Rothko's Captivating Color Field Paintings? Look to the Renaissance Masters Who Inspired Him © 2026 Smithsonian Institution.