Renato Casaro, who would have been 90 years old next Oct. 26, has passed away in his hometown of Treviso. Considered Italy’s most famous illustrator of movie posters and playbills, Casaro was an internationally renowned artist and among the most influential poster designers in the history of cinema. Hospitalized for several days in Treviso hospital with bronchopneumonia, he died in the night.
His works have accompanied entire generations of moviegoers, marking the collective imagination with thousands of posters created for directors of the caliber of Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, Quentin Tarantino, Franco Zeffirelli, Claude Lelouch and many others, collaborating with Hollywood’s most important majors.
Casaro’s connection with cinema began as a boy, when he hand-crafted large painted silhouettes for the Garibaldi Cinema Theater and the Esperia Cinema in Treviso. When he was only nineteen, he moved to Rome and worked in Augusto Favalli’s studio, where he learned the techniques of the craft. His first official poster was for the film Criminals Against the World (1955). Two years later he opened his own studio, launching a career that would bring him international acclaim.
A tireless and refined artist, Casaro has been able to interpret the language of cinema with his unmistakable stroke, earning the trust of great masters such as Jean-Jacques Annaud, Ingmar Bergman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Luc Besson, John Boorman, Liliana Cavani, Milos Forman, Costa-Gavras, Claude Lelouch, Sergio Leone, Sidney Lumet, Mario Monicelli, Francesco Rosi, Giuseppe Tornatore, François Truffaut, Carlo Verdone and many others. His art remains an irreplaceable testimony to the dialogue between painting and cinema, capable of evoking stories and emotions with a single glance.
“Renato Casaro’s passing leaves an unbridgeable void in the world of art and cinema, but his legacy will live forever here in Treviso, in this museum that is the ’home’ that he himself had chosen for his works,” says Elisabetta Pasqualin, director of the National Museum Collezione Salce in Treviso, which thanks to the Maestro’s generosity is the custodian of a substantial nucleus of his work and which has dedicated a permanent Hall at the San Gaetano headquarters to Renato Casaro. “We are honored for the long collaboration developed over the years between Maestro Casaro and the Museum, and grateful to him and his wife Gaby for the trust they have placed in the Salce Museum, recognizing it as the most appropriate cultural context to study and make his art known to the world. Our Hall is not just an exhibition section, but the symbol of a deep bond, a commitment that the Museum will renew with exhibitions and meetings dedicated to his figure and his unparalleled posters, such as Once Upon a Time in America, The Name of the Rose, Amadeus and Dances with Wolves.”
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| Farewell to Renato Casaro, among the most influential poster designers in film history |
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