Renato Casaro: Italian Film Poster Painter (1935–2025)

From a Treviso cinema to Cinecittà

Born in Treviso on 26 October 1935, Casaro began at seventeen at the town's Cinema Garibaldi, painting posters for the films showing there in exchange for free entry. In 1953, aged eighteen, he moved to Rome and worked for a year at Studio Favalli, one of the city's leading film-advertising studios. Two years later he opened his own studio at Cinecittà, becoming the youngest film painter in Italy. His first commission was a poster for a German film about Romeo and Juliet.

His international break came in 1965, when Dino De Laurentiis commissioned the artwork for John Huston's The Bible: In the Beginning… (1966). The poster was used worldwide, and Casaro went on to work with De Laurentiis on Flash Gordon, Dune and Conan the Barbarian.

Famous posters

• Sergio Leone's films, for which he painted almost all the posters, including A Fistful of Dollars and Once Upon a Time in America.
• The Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedies, which made his work familiar to every Italian cinema-goer.
• International fantasy and action: Flash Gordon, Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja, Octopussy, the international version of Rambo: First Blood Part II.
• Auteur cinema: posters for Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci, Claude Lelouch, Luc Besson, Franco Zeffirelli and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and for Solaris, My Name Is Nobody and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

Style and signature

Casaro was self-taught and learned by copying the illustrators he admired — above all Norman Rockwell and Angelo Cesselon — to understand how they built a picture. He worked mainly with brush and airbrush and is counted among Italy's finest airbrush artists. His mature work combines photographic likeness with heroic, dramatic lighting, which is why he is especially associated with fantasy and adventure films.

For Italian releases his artwork was printed mostly as 70 × 100, 100 × 140 and 140 × 198 cm posters (see poster sizes); for American releases the usual format was the 30 × 40 inch poster. The same image can therefore turn up in several countries and sizes, with different lettering.

His earliest film work is signed "C. Renè"; later posters carry "R. Casaro". Some later posters were made by his son Claudio under his supervision and are signed "Casaro C." in a triangle or "Claudio Casaro" — they are a different artist's work and should be described as such.

Awards and legacy

• Cinema e Società prize as best poster artist, 1983.
• Ciak d'oro for best film poster, 1988 (Opera) and 1991 (The Sheltering Sky); Promo Immagine Cinema award for best poster, 1991 (Nikita).
• Jupiter Award for best film poster, 1992 (Dances With Wolves).
• Stopped painting film posters in 1998, as studios moved to digital design.
• In 2019 Quentin Tarantino asked him to paint the vintage-style posters of the fictional Italian westerns in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, such as Nebraska Jim and Uccidimi subito Ringo, disse il Gringo.
• The 2020 documentary L'ultimo uomo che dipinse il cinema ("the last man who painted cinema"), directed by Walter Bencini, is devoted to his work; in 2024 he showed posters from his own collection at the Casa del Cinema during the Rome Film Festival.

His work is collected in several books, including Renato Casaro – Painted Movies, Renato Casaro – Movie Art and Renato Casaro – The Art of Movie Painting, which are useful for comparing a poster in front of you with his published designs.

Casaro is widely regarded as one of the most important and innovative Italian film poster artists. He died in Treviso on 30 September 2025, aged 89. For collectors, first-release Italian posters of his best-known titles — especially Leone's westerns and the 1980s fantasy films — are among the most sought after of the period.