Biography

Renzo Grazzini was born in Florence in the Santa Croce district in 1912 from a cobbler father and a housewife mother. He completed his studies at the Porta Romana Art Institute and from there began his long journey in painting; feeling very attached to this type of art, he graduated in 1934. Due to the outbreak of the First World War, the conflict led him to serve his country and was sent first to Libya, then to Abyssinia and finally to Albania where most of the his life, up to about thirty years old. War is a source of torment and despair for him, so much so that he writes in his diary: “maybe tomorrow it will all be a slow dying inside what today we are losing”. Back from the war, Grazzini; from 1946 to 1972 he taught at the Porta Romana Art Institute, his old school, first as a master of art, then as holder of the chair of painting. On January 28, 1990 Renzo Grazzini died.

Philosophy

Initially the themes of his works are the traditional ones of Tuscan painting: landscapes, figures, still lifes; but in his paintings there is no trace of Macchiaioli derivation. The commitment assumed in the partisan war, the ruins and the death in his arms of his brotherly friend Bruno Becchi leave deep traces in his soul so that around the fifties he depicts those dramatic events in a series of drawings, mainly using colours such as White and black. His neorealism does not belong to any current, but is the result of the insistent search for a language of a formal type in which the great invective and the aptitude for psychological excavation are confirmed, revealing his sensitivity and also his delicacy in drawing, the loving arrangement of the page despite the tearing of the image that on many occasions is affected by German expressionism. The signs of friendships with Vasco Pratolini, Elio Vettorini and Ottone Rosai, with whom he shares the Florentine culture of that period, are very evident in his painting.

Artwork in Castagno

Paloscia entrusted the Florentine painter with the execution of the Marzo (March) fresco for the museum village of Castagno. He decides to depict a woman holding a blue flower in her hand with a disconsolate air; in the background there is a male marble bust of classical memory. Stylistically speaking, the work presents the author’s signature: the strokes are of expressionist derivation, are simplified, and the colours all tend to a meagre greyish cerulean white. The statue, surrounded by lush vegetation, could represent a happy and prosperous past, which the girl regrets in a grey present, in which the only thing you have is hope, metaphorically the blue flower.