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. Ye

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