There But For The Grace of God?

I was very interested to read in the Weekend FT Arts of an exhibition of Mark Rothko's painting in Florence running currently. Not housed and concentrated in a single exhibition space, but distributed throughout three venues: the Palazzo Strozzi, the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana and the Museo Di San Marco. I would dearly love to see these pictures in this latter context [above] as I'm of the opinion that of all twentieth century artists, Rothko is the most deeply and humanly spiritual of painters, and whose works sit most naturally alongside those of the great Italian quattrocento painters such as Fra Angelico. Rothko had the ability in his later paintings to bring the sublime into secular life in a way that few others have achieved. Religious belief isn't the central point of his work, much as I believe that religion, oddly, isn't a prerequisite for the spiritual experience of introspection in religious buildings either great or humble. Zen is zen, after all, and the sublime is within all of us.

The obstacles to getting there to see one of my favourite artist's work in such unique surroundings? In the first place, money. I've been fortunate enough to visit and stay in Firenze a couple of times, when I was flush enough with cash to fund the trips: these days, I'd have to flay the beejeezus out of my credit cards to do it, which wouldn't exactly be sensible; and secondly, post-Brexit - God damn its eyes - travel into and out of Italy appears to be a mind-numbing ball-ache of a task for us now 'foreign' tourists. As a week's stay at the most is probably all that's financially feasible these days, spending two of those days standing in line for passport control to let one enter and then repeating the exercise to leave the country would rather take the shine off the trip. So, lottery win notwithstanding, we won't be going, but there you go, zazen it is then...