Mark Rothko: The Silence of Color

by Elena Geuna

Florence is a city built on the belief that the visible can lead us toward the invisible. Nowhere else is the boundary between the material and the spiritual so deliberately thinned, by the gold of an altarpiece or the hush of light on plastered walls. In the early Renaissance, artists and thinkers here believed that geometry was a pathway to grace, that proportion might reflect a divine order, and that the placement of color on a wall could alter the soul of the one who beheld it. Without separating the rational from the spiritual, beauty itself became a form of metaphysical knowledge shaped through harmony, expressed in proportion and color. Transcendence, in the Florentine sense, was found in the careful articulation of the world, in forms of expression that were anchored to physical space while pointing beyond it.[2]

Few works embody this vision more fully than the frescoes of Fra Angelico, painted between 1439 and 1444 for the cells of the Observant Dominican monastery of San Marco. His frescoes, whether a Visitation, or a Crucifixion, were conceived to open a contemplative space where silence and color could communicate a truth beyond words. In the stillness of the monastic cells, the frescoes vibrate with ethereal hues of blue, rose, and ocher, hovering at the boundary where the image becomes inseparable from the act of inward contemplation. It was to these rooms that Mark Rothko came more than five centuries later, during his first visit to Italy in the spring of 1950. We can almost picture him, ambling through the halls of the Museum of San Marco, alone in the soft Florentine light, stopping in front of each of Fra Angelico’s frescoes as well as his altarpieces. Before those radiant yet pared-down scenes emptied of spectacle, suffused with tonal restraint, he would have recognized an artistic logic remarkably aligned with his own, where meaning unfolds only through the patience of looking. From the Museum of San Marco, he made his way to the Laurentian Library, where Michelangelo’s staircase presses inward and upward, as though space itself were contemplating its own form. In its grandeur and calculated disquiet, the architecture offers a drama of form that Rothko, ever attentive to the emotional valence of proportion and weight, would not have missed. Years later, Rothko would recognize in Michelangelo’s architecture a theater of space and gravity, and would recall the Laurentian Library as formative, citing it directly when reflecting on a series of murals he had begun for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York, part of a commission for the Seagram Building. Though he would ultimately withdraw from the Seagram commission, the paintings carry the architectural imprint of that Florentine encounter. Rothko had been struck by the vestibule’s blocked windows and heavy stillness, which, to him, expressed a very particular kind of emotional intensity, charged with an unresolved innermost pressure. “He achieved just the kind of feeling I’m after,” Rothko remarked of Michelangelo. “He makes the viewers feel that they are trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall.” It is no coincidence that Florence provides the setting for this exhibition.

For Rothko, Florence was an encounter with a visual language that mirrored his own longings. If Fra Angelico’s frescoes offered a model of contemplative openness, then the Laurentian Library presented an embodiment of the existential weight Rothko would later pursue in the darker, more enclosed canvases of the 1960s. The city’s chromatic restraint and its capacity to stage the visible as a threshold to the invisible resonated deeply with his own evolving vision. In Florence, and its Masters, the artist was able to recognize an architecture of silence that would come to define his own painterly language.[2]

Mark Rothko and Fra Angelico

Throughout his life, Rothko engaged with philosophical, aesthetic and historiographical issues, constantly redefining and questioning his own position as an artist. His ideas reveal his involvement with and research into early Italian painting, particularly that of Giotto di Bondone (1264–1337) and Fra Angelico. His numerous trips to Italy allowed him to admire the works of Giotto and Beate Angelico in situ.

During his first trip to Europe in 1950, Mark Rothko found deep inspiration in Fra Angelico's frescoes in the monastery of San Marco in Florence. Fra Angelico's ecclesiastical commissions, painted in the fifteenth century, were also expressions of his faith and devotion. Rothko was impressed by the subtle way in which the artist used light and colour, and how his frescoes invited contemplative viewing.
For Rothko, the frescoes reflected what Hegel described as the invention of “artistic interiority”. This experience offered Rothko a gateway to emotional transcendence, which formed the impetus for his own work. It was the meditative and inner atmosphere in the frescoes of San Marco that Rothko hoped to evoke himself, and with which he defined his artistic conception of space: Rothko imagined chapel-like spaces ‘in which the traveller or traveller could contemplate one detail of a painting in a small room’.

Throughout his life, Rothko insisted that he was not an abstract painter. He controlled the hanging of his works and called his paintings “murals”, analogous to the Italian technique of fresco painting.
In 1957, he wrote, ‘I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions - tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on [...]. The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.’[5]