Palazzo Strozzi

Palazzo Strozzi is one of Florence's most celebrated Renaissance palaces, occupying a commanding position in the city's historic centre between the Duomo and the Arno. Commissioned by the Strozzi banking family and completed in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the building is a landmark of Florentine civic architecture, its rusticated stone facade and grand internal courtyard designed by Giuliano da Sangallo and Benedetto da Maiano among others. After centuries as a private residence and later a cultural institution, it now operates as a major contemporary exhibition space, hosting internationally significant shows that place modern and Renaissance art in direct conversation with one another.

The current exhibition, Rothko in Florence, brings a substantial body of work by the American abstract expressionist Mark Rothko into dialogue with the palace's Renaissance surroundings. The pairing invites visitors to consider Rothko's luminous colour fields alongside the city that shaped so much of Western art history, creating an encounter that is particular to this building and this moment in Florence's cultural life.