ArtistItalianb.1935–d.2022
Casaro Renato
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Renato Casaro was born on October 26, 1935, in Treviso, a city in the Veneto region of northern Italy. His relationship with cinema started early: as a teenager he drew posters on the walls of the local Garibaldi Cinema in exchange for free tickets. This informal apprenticeship led to formal training as a lithographer at the Zoppelli printing house, and then, at nineteen, to a position as an illustrator at the film advertising agency Studio Favalli in Rome. He left after a year to open his own studio, at twenty-one.
His first major commission came through Dino De Laurentiis, who hired him for the epic production of The Bible (1966). The work established Casaro's reputation in the Italian film industry, and commissions followed rapidly. Through the late 1960s and 1970s he produced posters for a wide range of productions, collaborating repeatedly with directors including Sergio Leone, their association began with A Fistful of Dollars and continued through My Name Is Nobody and Once Upon a Time in America. The combination of large-format oil painting with airbrush work allowed Casaro to achieve a precision and atmospheric depth that made his compositions immediately legible at the scale film promotion required.
The 1980s brought Casaro international visibility. His one-sheet for Conan the Barbarian (1982), painted after a visit to the film's set in Almeria, was distributed worldwide and remains his most reproduced individual work. Other major campaigns from this decade include James Bond films, among them Octopussy and Never Say Never Again, Flash Gordon, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Red Sonja, and The NeverEnding Story. His style suited the decade's appetite for vivid, physically dynamic imagery, but it was grounded in a discipline developed over two decades of Italian commercial illustration.
Casaro stopped designing posters commercially in 1998, when studios moved decisively toward digital composition. He continued painting, however, and remained connected to the film world, most visibly when Quentin Tarantino sought him out while shooting Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), commissioning a vintage-style poster for the fictional Italian Western at the center of the plot. In 2025, the Salce Collection National Museum in Treviso dedicated a permanent gallery to his work.
Casaro died from bronchopneumonia in Treviso on September 30, 2025, at the age of eighty-nine. On the auction market his work is primarily handled by Finarte in Italy, which in February 2026 dedicated an entire sale to him, "The Cinema of Renato Casaro: Posters and Sketches", featuring more than twenty original sketches and over fifty signed posters. Auctionist's data shows 79 items from Casaro, all appearing at Finarte, catalogued in the Collectibles category, reflecting the crossover audience his work attracts between film memorabilia collectors and buyers of original illustration art.