When the age of the hand-painted Italian film poster began its slow decline, one painter alone kept the tradition alive on the world stage: Renato Casaro. Born in Treviso on 26 October 1935 and died suddenly on 30 September 2025 just weeks short of his ninetieth birthday, he was the last of the great Italian poster painters, the Pittori Cartellonisti, an artist whose career spanned the golden age of the 1950s all the way to the threshold of the digital era, when he alone was still painting against the tide of photography and computer graphics. His work runs through the whole of popular cinema: genre films and epics, Sergio Leone and Hollywood, Germany and Japan, right up to a final tribute from Quentin Tarantino.

From Treviso to the Favalli studio: the early years

The vocation came early, and it came from the street. As a boy, Casaro spent hours copying the posters displayed outside the cinemas of Treviso, and while still a teenager he was already painting advertising panels for the local picture houses. At nineteen came the leap to Rome, where he joined the studio of Augusto Favalli, one of the great workshops through which Italian film advertising passed in those years. It was the same apprenticeship system that produced so many painters of that generation: you watched, you copied, you learned fast, because distributors were always in a hurry.

Casaro learned very quickly. By the second half of the 1950s he was already signing posters under his own name, and in 1957 he opened his own studio. Distribution houses began choosing his designs for Italian and international titles alike: barely into his twenties, the young man from Treviso was already painting the walls of Italy. As with every painter of that school, each poster was created independently within the working relationship with the distributor, but the image itself remained the creation of its individual artist, and unmistakably his.

Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955)

The poster for Diabolique (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955), created by Casaro for an Italian re-release in the early 1960s. Véra Clouzot's terrified face rises out of a swirling green vortex of murky water, beneath a title lettered in dripping yellow, wet as fresh paint. The most celebrated thriller by the French master of suspense, rendered with striking maturity, an early glimpse of the great master he would become, and already a small masterclass in building fear from just two colours.

Dino De Laurentiis and the genre years

Recognition came in the mid-1960s, when Dino De Laurentiis chose his images for his own major productions. The poster for John Huston's The Bible: In the Beginning... (1966) put him on the international map: from that point on, Casaro was the painter behind the big launches. With De Laurentiis he also signed the image for Mario Bava's Danger: Diabolik (1968), stepping into the most feverish season of Italian genre cinema, alongside colleagues and rivals such as Rodolfo Gasparri and Sandro Symeoni, and crossing paths in the Roman studios with the younger generation, among them Aller, with whom Casaro would go on to share both collaborations and clients.

These were the years of the Italian western, the genre in which his brush became closely associated with Sergio Leone: Casaro created the poster for My Name Is Nobody (1973), the western conceived by Leone and starring Terence Hill and Henry Fonda. And for the director’s late-career masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), it was Casaro who created the large painted poster used for the film’s international release, distributed in Germany and many other countries. But his greatest popular triumph came under another name: that of two carefree gun-slinging brothers.

Danger: Diabolik (Mario Bava, 1968)

The poster for Danger: Diabolik (Mario Bava, 1968), produced by Dino De Laurentiis. John Phillip Law's blue eyes behind the green mask, the title repeated like an echo, and the white circle holding the black-clad thief and Marisa Mell: comic-book psychedelia transferred whole onto the wall. The cult film that brought the Giussani sisters' creation to the screen, in one of the most pop images of Casaro's entire career.

Trinity, Germi and Monicelli: the 1970s

In 1970 came They Call Me Trinity, and with it a phenomenon nobody had predicted: the pairing of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer packed cinemas as no one else could, and the image greeting audiences outside every theatre was Casaro's. The gunslinger asleep on his travois, dragged along under an orange sun, became a fixture of the national imagination, repeated the following year for Trinity Is Still My Name. Few Italian posters have been seen by so many people.

The decade also brought him comedy, and with it one of the most singular episodes in Italian film history, spelled out directly on his poster for My Friends (1975): "un film di Pietro Germi, regia di Mario Monicelli", a film by Pietro Germi, directed by Mario Monicelli. Germi, gravely ill, had handed his own project to his friend Monicelli, who brought it to the screen under that unusual joint credit. Casaro's poster, with the five friends' heads popping up on springs from a jack-in-the-box, has preserved that handover of authorship ever since.

They Call Me Trinity (E.B. Clucher, 1970)

The poster for They Call Me Trinity (E.B. Clucher, 1970). Terence Hill sleeps peacefully on the travois pulled by his horse, hat over his face and feet bare, set against an orange sun that fills the whole sheet. It is one of the most recognisable images in Italian cinema: laziness turned into epic, for the film that helped define the comic Western and became a major box-office success.

The airbrush and the world: the 1980s and 1990s

While in Italy the hand-painted poster was fading out, Casaro went the other way and became an international artist. He was a virtuoso of the airbrush, and his works were often chosen by American, German and Japanese productions. The list of titles from these years reads like a piece of world cinema history: Conan the Barbarian, Never Say Never Again, with Sean Connery back as Bond in his dinner jacket, The NeverEnding Story, The Name of the Rose, Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Dances with Wolves, and, again for Bertolucci, The Sheltering Sky in 1990. By then posters everywhere were being made from photographs, yet directors and producers who wanted a truly memorable image kept coming back to him: the last great brush still at work.

Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982)

The poster for Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982), painted by Renato Casaro. Arnold Schwarzenegger in the role that made him a star, the sword raised above the title carved like rock: the fantasy epic of the early 1980s finds in Casaro's brush its definitive image, all muscle, steel and skies of fire. It is the kind of major international commission to which the Treviso-born master tied his name in those years.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (George P. Cosmatos, 1985)

The locandina (the small Italian format) for Rambo: First Blood Part II(George P. Cosmatos, 1985). Stallone bare-chested with the machine gun, helicopters overhead and a fiery sunset behind him: the vertical card of Italian tradition, with the blank strip at the top for the cinema's name and screening times. These were the years when, alongside the 100 × 140 cm poster, the 70 × 100 cm format, the poster proper, also became widespread in Italy, often reusing the same painted image. The muscular icon of the 1980s, airbrushed with a precision that photography itself could envy.

Africa, Tarantino and the legacy

When the age of the film poster closed, Casaro did not stop painting; he simply changed his subject. Large canvases devoted to Africa and its wildlife became his focus for at least the last fifteen years of his life, fed by his travels and by a fascination he loved to talk about, one he was planning to return to and experience again first-hand. Cinema, meanwhile, came looking for him one last time, in the most affectionate way possible: in 2019 Quentin Tarantino wanted him personally to paint the posters for the fictional films within Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, the imaginary Italian Westerns of the fading star Rick Dalton. The last of the great poster painters, asked to invent the posters of an era he had actually lived through: a tribute equal to an entire career.

Those who knew him remember a gentle man and a devoted husband. He himself described his wife as his greatest strength. He shared with her not only his life but also his professional choices, a guiding presence throughout his career. He liked to visit the archives where his posters had been kept, searching out his own works for a book he was always preparing and never quite finished, with the patience of a man who had nothing left to prove. And those who were there remember his emotion at the opening of an exhibition marking the centenary of the Italian Air Force, curated by Maria Grazia Bella and built largely around period materials, when in a neighbouring room he came upon the work of Marcello Dudovich: the last master of the Italian poster, moved to find himself standing before an even older master, as if a century of history had closed in a single glance. In his last video appearance, he named his favourite among all his own posters: The Sheltering Sky. Renato Casaro died suddenly in September 2025, leaving his wife and friends stunned, with projects still unfinished. He worked until the very end, and his images go on doing what they always did: stopping people in their tracks, and promising them a film.

The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990)

The poster for The Sheltering Sky (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1990). A figure wrapped in a dark cloak descends a sand-coloured dune, alone beneath an immense light: Bertolucci's adaptation of Paul Bowles's novel, with Debra Winger and John Malkovich, rendered in one of the most elegant images ever to come off Casaro's airbrush. It was his favourite among his own posters, as he confirmed in his final public appearance: the quietest painting of a spectacular career, chosen as his farewell.

The works reproduced on this page come from the original prints of the period, recovered, photographed and digitally restored by Movie.it.