Arturo Galansino (in the picture under the title), Director General of the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, has brought to Florence a series of exhibitions that have gone viral in much the same way as content on social media. The most striking example is the exhibition dedicated to the Renaissance painter Fra Angelico, which opened in autumn 2025 and attracted a record-breaking 250,000 visitors—the highest attendance in Palazzo Strozzi’s twenty-year history. Why did it resonate so widely? According to Galansino, it starts with quality, but several other factors also played a role, which we discussed with him in our conversation.
The exhibition on Beato Angelico attracted 250,000 visitors, a record for Palazzo Strozzi. You managed to make early Renaissance art feel pop.
“We expected it to be successful, but not to this extent. We had an enormous audience, from leading experts — collectors, museum directors, curators — to complete newcomers, and that in itself is quite revealing.”
What do you attribute this global success to?
“To the fact that it was an extraordinary event. It proves that quality still has the power to move people. Visitors understood that this was an exhibition they could see only once in a lifetime, perhaps once in history. Seeing it was an opportunity to discover, in a unique way, the work of a giant of the Renaissance.”
What made it so unique?
“The ambition and value of the project lay in bringing together Angelico’s works, including masterpieces loaned exclusively for the occasion, sometimes even stretching the usual lending rules. There were 28 reconstructed altarpieces, dismantled in the nineteenth century, reassembled and shown together for the first time in two hundred years. The exhibition also extended into the convent of Museo di San Marco, where visitors could see the frescoes in situ.”
You said this exhibition will go down in history. Why?
“An exhibition enters history when it changes the way people see an artist or succeeds in making that artist part of mainstream culture. Very few people truly understood Angelico’s greatness, mainly because his work had literally been broken apart and dispersed across museums worldwide. The Palazzo Strozzi exhibition offered a comprehensive vision of his oeuvre. It revealed that he was not the conservative painter art history often described, and officially established him among the innovators of the Renaissance. Specialists may already have known this; now the wider public does too.”
How important is Florence to the success of your exhibitions?
“Our exhibitions are always connected to the history of Florentine art — Donatello, Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino… Even when we present contemporary art, there is always a link with the city. The Foundation is a place deeply tied to Florence’s identity. But there is another side to it. Most tourists come first and foremost for the Uffizi Galleries, the Accademia, or the Duomo. We had to build our audience from scratch. Now, people travel specifically for our exhibitions. It also becomes an opportunity to return to a wonderful city while avoiding the busiest places and seasons.”
Does the new Rothko exhibition also speak to Florence?
“The exhibition (running until August 23) highlights the essential relationship between the American painter Mark Rothko and Florence. For the first time — and perhaps the last — five of his paintings are displayed inside the cells of the Museo di San Marco alongside Angelico’s frescoes, which deeply affected him and influenced his path toward spiritual abstraction. The same is true of Laurentian Library and Michelangelo’s vestibule: that purely Renaissance architecture inspired the Seagram Murals, and hanging two of Rothko’s works there gives them an added resonance. Even Christopher Rothko, the painter’s son and curator of the exhibition, said this is the exhibition his father would have dreamed of, because he loved Florence and learned so much from it. Once again, we created a project that could not have happened anywhere else.”
What’s next?
“On September 25 we open Broken (running until January 24, 2027), an exhibition on fragments in the history of sculpture, organized in collaboration with the National Gallery of Art. The fragment is an archetype found across countless cultures, from 3000 BC to the present day, in South America, Oceania, Asia, Europe… Everywhere, statues and sculptures have been broken for different reasons — devotional practices, damnatio memoriae, religious wars, theft — and yet certain pieces were always preserved. For us, it’s an unusual subject, outside our usual lines of research, but one that opens up fascinating new directions.”