“The large paintings envelop the viewer and invite him or her in, it is an invitation to a self contained world where one can lose oneself and perhaps in the process find oneself. And for all their grandest of scale it is an intimate experience, a world unique to that particular encounter” - Christopher Rothko, Mark Rothko and the Inner World

Welcome to Episode #140:

In Italy, Mark Rothko (1903-1970) found what he was looking for.

On a long voyage in Europe in 1950 with his wife, Rothko found himself in Florence, in the cradle of the Italian Renaissance - Today I share the story about this encounter and the shift in perspective that occurred for his painting, and the places in Italy that opened a new dialogue, a liberation of colour.

Mark Rothko is currently on exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. There are three site specific places to see this exhibition including the Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) and the Museum of San Marco (Museo di San Marco) in Florence.

Mark Rothko is most known for his colour field paintings, the great abstract artworks that have become iconic in modern art. Today I share about his life, the influence of Italy, and the experience of seeing a Rothko artwork in person (think rapture meets a direct experience of a unified colour field) and why you should go if you can.

"Rothko’s art is an invitation. It is a doorway and really demands that you pay attention" - Michelle Johnston

Visit: Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi

"Rothko’s first encounter with Florence dates to 1950, during a trip to Italy with his wife Mell. He was deeply moved by Fra Angelico’s frescoes at the Convent of San Marco and by Michelangelo’s architectural vision in the Vestibule of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, which would inspire the Seagram Murals painted in the late 1950s—a dialogue that Rothko further developed during his second visit to Florence in 1966. In some of his more delicate works, one can also perceive the influence of fifteenth-century Italian art and, in particular, of Angelico’s fresco technique. Rothko and Angelico shared a desire to evoke a sense of transcendence, a dimension at once distant and profoundly familiar. While Angelico achieved this through the emotional resonance of divine figures in dialogue with earthly reality, Rothko created color fields capable of accompanying viewers into different emotional depths, challenging accepted notions of abstraction and color theory" - Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Enjoy,

Michelle x

Shownotes

A Writer in Italy Instagram

Substack - At My Table

Michelle’s Books

Musical Scores by Richard Johnston

A Writer in Italy is about travel and life. A place to share the beautiful travel journeys and the discoveries along the way.

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