“Renzo never cavorts blindly in his art,” wrote Feliks Topolski of his friend and fellow artist, my father Renzo Galeotti, who has died aged 85. On paper, on canvas, and occasionally in sculpture, he was a creator who never saw any reason to disconnect his art from his politics and his wider sense of the world.
This was most evident in his cycles of studies of the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci and the author Primo Levi, but was as true of his other works, from commissioned portraits to landscapes of his home town of Carrara, Tuscany, that charted the way the insatiable demand for local marble was devouring the Apuan Alps, towering over the town.
