Averardo Ciriello (Milan, May 28, 1918 – Rome, November 5, 2016) was one of the greatest poster painters in the history of cinema. Over a career spanning nearly seventy years, he created around three thousand sketches for both the Italian and international markets. Today, on his birthday, it is the right moment to tell the story of his life, his works, and a talent that remained in the shadows for far too long.

Biography: from the Castello Sforzesco School of Art to the Navy

Ciriello grew up in Milan and trained at the Castello Sforzesco School of Art, an environment that valued rigorous draughtsmanship and applied arts. This technical grounding would remain evident throughout his entire career: even in his most commercial works, his anatomical and compositional control was of near-academic precision.

In Milan he soon began working as an advertising illustrator, first at the Non Plus Ultra agency and then at IMA, the largest advertising agency in Italy. When World War II broke out, his path changed abruptly: he enlisted in the Navy, where he served for five years. When the military discovered his graphic skills, he was assigned to the Press and Propaganda Office as an illustrator for the official Navy newspaper. This experience, far removed from any art school, proved fundamental: it developed in him an extraordinary speed of execution and the ability to communicate instantly through images, two qualities that would appear in every one of his movie posters.

The post-war years and the rise in popular illustration

It was precisely in the Navy that he met journalist Vittorio Calvino, who introduced him to the world of cinema. Meanwhile, his name began to spread rapidly through the Italian popular illustration circuit. He debuted as a cartoonist for the weekly Acqua salata and in 1945 joined the pages of Cino Del Duca's Intrepido. These were years when illustration was a genuine cultural industry, and Ciriello became one of its most recognisable figures.

His great popular success came with the alluring pin-up covers of the magazine 7Sette (later Otto and Otto volante), which turned him into the true heir of Gino Boccasile, the most celebrated Italian illustrator of female figures in the twentieth century. The comparison is flattering but not entirely accurate: compared to Boccasile, Ciriello's line was generally softer and more cinematic, less geometric and propagandistic. His women did not pose, they lived inside the image.

However, the drawings for 7Sette provoked the fury of the era's strict censors, to the point that the magazine was forced to close, only to be reborn under the title 8otto. During the 1950s he also created vignettes and covers for Marc'Aurelio and La Domenica del Corriere, two of the most widely read publications in Italy.

The film career: three thousand posters for the silver screen

Ciriello signed his first contract around 1947, when the advertising department of Lux Film chose some of his works. Over the course of his career he produced around three thousand sketches for both the Italian and international markets.

Three thousand. This is not an abstract number: it is a constant, almost industrial output, demanding speed without ever sacrificing quality. Colleagues and collaborators recalled his ability to complete covers and film sketches in surprisingly short periods of time, a direct legacy of his years in military propaganda. His distinctive painterly style was characterised by the use of colour for symbolic and strongly emotional effect, with a meticulous attention to detail and nuance that was uncommon in film illustration of the period.

Unlike other more expressionist poster artists, Ciriello always maintained a strong bond with figurative realism. His faces were constructed with near-academic care, often derived from a thorough photographic study of the actors. In posters dedicated to actresses, a particular sensitivity emerges in the rendering of skin, gazes and fabrics, a painterly quality that made his works appreciated well beyond the world of cinema. He also worked on the retouching of production photographs, but always interpreted rather than copied them, bringing them to a higher emotional temperature.

The James Bond posters: Ciriello draws the world's most famous secret agent

One of the most fascinating chapters of his output concerns the 007 saga. In the 1960s he created the posters for the first historic films starring Sean Connery: From Russia with Love (1963) and Goldfinger (1965). He also produced the celebrated collective poster Everybody Against James Bond for the 1972 film festival, a rare piece now highly sought after by collectors worldwide.

His most celebrated works: four posters to know

Rear Window Alfred Hitchcock (1954). The poster that best reveals his compositional intelligence. At the top, Grace Kelly's luminous face, suspended in the darkness like a promise. Below, James Stewart motionless and the threatening silhouette in the opposite window. Two contrasting emotional registers in perfect balance. Ciriello does not illustrate the plot, he captures its psychological atmosphere.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof- Richard Brooks (1958). Elizabeth Taylor in the foreground with a gaze that asks no one's permission, Paul Newman barely sketched in the background. The approach is the polar opposite of Hitchcock, no psychological depth, pure direct impact, yet the result is equally powerful: a poster that shouts from the wall.

We'll Meet in the Gallery - Mauro Bolognini (1953). An Italian musical comedy, warm colours, a crowded theatrical composition. Sophia Loren, then very young, already unmistakable, commands the centre with that magnetic presence Ciriello captures with absolute confidence. Proof that he mastered every visual register.

La terra trema - Luchino Visconti (1948). A raw, demanding neorealist film with no stars to portray. Ciriello responds with pure pictorial dynamism: men on a boat in a storm, waves, foam, the red of the title cutting through the scene like a cry. Popular without betraying the seriousness of the subject.

A professional of the image, not an elite artist

He moved within the circle of Italy's great post-war poster painters, coming into contact with Alessandro Biffignandi, Fernando Carcupino, Carlo Jacono and Enzo Sciotti. Though belonging to different generations and sensibilities, these artists shared studios, publishers, clients and the artisanal techniques of Italian illustration. It was an intensely competitive world, where production pressures were immense and specialized printing houses, communication agencies and distributors' advertising departments of film distributors competed for their works.

Ciriello saw himself above all as a professional of the image in the service of the public, not as an elite artist. This almost artisanal conception of his craft is precisely what makes him so extraordinary: he knew that the poster hanging outside a cinema was often the first and only contact a viewer had with a film before buying a ticket. There were no trailers, no clips, no instant reviews. There was that image, on a wall. And it had to be enough.

Ciriello continued working in publishing even after stepping back from film poster work, lending his pen to the erotic comic magazine Menelik, published by Tattilo, the well-known publisher famous for Playmen. His involvement in the erotic comics of the 1960s and 70s was for a long time one of the reasons his artistic reputation was undervalued a genre viewed with suspicion by the cultural establishment, but one that reached millions of readers.

The reappraisal and the collector's market

Recognition came late, but wholeheartedly. The Fermo Immagine Museum today holds an extensive collection of his posters, studied in design schools and cited as a reference by illustrators around the world. Period prints of his works have been sold repeatedly at auction, with prices reaching $7,000 per piece.  

Ciriello died in Rome on November 5, 2016, aged 99. Almost a century of life, nearly seventy years of career. His posters, created to last a few days on a wall, have been preserved thanks to countless collectors, art lovers and film enthusiasts.

Where to find Averardo Ciriello's posters

Ciriello's posters are available on movie.it. Works restored to their original splendour, bringing into your home the talent of a great artist and a genuine fragment of the golden age of cinema.

Ciriello is the first in a series of portraits dedicated to Italy's great poster painters. Next will come Anselmo Ballester, Luigi Martinati, Enzo Sciotti and many others: artists who gave artistic form to the visual imagination of world cinema.