Renato Casaro died yesterday at the age of 89.
I’m ashamed to admit that I’d never heard Renato Casaro’s name before today, but I sure knew his work, and so do you. For example, he did this poster for Octopussy.
Renato Casaro was a legendary Italian film poster artist, responsible for such hand-painted beauties as this:
But that’s just the start. Even a cursory google image search brings up an absolute bounty of classic posters that we have Mr. Casaro to thank for.
Dino De Laurentiis first hired Casaro in 1965 to design the poster for the film The Bible: In the Beginning. It was the start of a fruitful relationship, with Casaro designing posters for many De Laurentiis produced films such as…
Casaro worked with Sergio Leone, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Luc Besson, among many others. More recently he designed several movie-within-a-movie posters for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Hand painted movie posters may be a dying art in this digital age, but in my opinion there is nothing like the real thing. As far as legacies go, this is not a bad one. RIP Renato Casaro.
