The Art of Renato Fratini by Timothy R. Smith

After a hugely successful Kickstarter, The Art of Renato Fratini has become a reality. It was, truth be told, already written and designed, edited and ready to go because this has "labour of love"  permeating every page like a subtle but inescapable perfume. If the Kickstarter hadn't worked, the book would have appeared some time, somehow, because it needs to exist.

My first encounter with Fratini was on the covers of Mickey Spillane and Alistair MacLean novels that my dad kept in a cupboard next to his chair in our family home. These would be turfed out regularly as he completed a pile, taken to work and left for anyone to pick up for free. 

Tim Smith has pieced together a biography of Fratini's life, career and influence like a jigsaw puzzle from a handful of written sources and some revealing interviews with friends and family. He charts  Fratini's rise, from an impoverished household in Civitavecchia, near Rome, where he was encouraged to draw and earned himself a place at Rome's Accademia di Belle Arti, aged 17.

Two years drawing comics for Studio Guerri helped prepare him to join Studio Favalli,  the most famous Italian studio producing cinema posters where Fratini worked for seven years; he then moved to London and worked for Rank and Downton Advertising. His work included cinema posters (famously From Russia With Love), advertising brochures, illustrations, book covers and paintings. Typical of many of Soho's denizens, he would do paintings for credit in fashionable trattorias and exhibited abstracts at La Terrazza.

His studio in Kensington was a hubbub of activity, Fratini working hard and enjoying Swinging London late into the night. Unhappy when he discovered that his artwork was being sold abroad without further payment, he tried to take control of his work, and when British publishers moving into photographic covers, began selling to American publishers in the late 1960s. 

The late '60s also saw him divorced, remarried and, for the first time, a father. Friends tempted him to move to Mexico where he quickly established himself with commissions and advertising keeping him busy. Too busy, as, in 1973, he suffered a fatal heart attack, aged 40.

The bulk of the book is a visual bibliography of Frantini's work, from his often richly coloured Italian and British cinema posters—everything from Lawrence of Arabia, Barbarella and Cape Fear to Norman Wisdom and Eric & Ernie movies—through magazine illustrations (including a few comic covers) to book covers for Ace, Consul, Arrow, Corgi, Hodder/Coronet, Fontana, Four Square, Pan, Panther and Penguin, as well as dust jackets for Heinemann, Macmillan and others.

This visual feast runs to 448 pages. The introductory matter is heavily illustrated and the gallery sections run to roughly 380 pages, packed with beautiful images, neatly laid out with the occasional bonus of an original art board. The research that has gone into it is astonishing, the artwork is astounding and the results are one of the best studies of the career and work of an artist in print.

The Art of Renato Fratini by Timothy R. Smith
Ink Forge Press, 2026, 448pp. Available from Ink Forge Press.