Renato Casaro (1935–2025):
Renato Casaro is the Italian painter who gave cinema its mythic face.He began painting movie posters as a teenager outside his local theater and rose through Rome’s Cinecittà Studios to become the go-to artist for filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Dino De Laurentiis. His brush created the worlds of Conan the Barbarian, The NeverEnding Story, Dune, and The Last Emperor—images that turned films into modern icons. Eventually his work was replaced by computer design and cheaper software. This episode asks what his story reveals about our own age of automation: why make anything by hand when a machine can do it faster, and what do we lose when beauty no longer needs a human heartbeat to exist?
FOR MORE:
- The Michelangelo of Movie Posters, NY Times
- The Last Movie Painter (Documentary, 2021)
- Renato Casaro’s official site: www.renatocasaro.com
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