I challenge the Rothko naysayers to stand in front of his monumental art and not feel awe, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

An exhibition in Florence that pairs his giant canvases with Renaissance religious art brought me to the edge of tears. It is the perfect refuge from the infinite scroll

As an unbaptised agnostic raised with no religion, the closest I ever really come to a spiritual experience is when I’m standing in front of an artwork. Last week I went to Florence to do exactly that, drawn there not by Michelangelo’s David or Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but by the works of Mark Rothko, that titan of US abstract expressionism whose work seems, on the surface at least, distinctly secular and un-Florentine. Yet seeing Renaissance art there had a profound impact on Rothko and his painting, as the exhibition Rothko in Florence makes strikingly explicit. Taking place at Palazzo Strozzi and two other satellite sites, it has been curated by his son, Christopher, and the author and independent curator Elena Geuna.

Is it embarrassing to admit that when confronted with the first large canvas I was drawn to I felt tearful? It was an emotion born of appreciation and astonishment but also, and this startled me, a feeling of gratitude. I felt profoundly lucky to be there, in front of this painting, not long after a time in my life where for various reasons I had been not been feeling all that fortunate at all. To have the chance to take in the paint on the monumental canvas, and absorb the ways the colours, purples, reds, oranges, yellows, blues, blend and in places seem to glow felt hugely significant to me personally. And then, as I continued to look, and as ever with Rothko, I stopped thinking about myself at all.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist

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