LUIGI MARTINATI: AN ARTIST FOR ALL SEASONS


Among cinema poster collectors, Luigi Martinati is best known as the creator of the greatest posters for films featuring Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, all under the Warner Brothers label. However, it would be belittling to say that Martinati was just a Bogart portraitist.

Luigi Martinati was born in Florence in 1893; he attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti (School of Fine Arts) and honed his artistic training under the teachers Ludovico Tommasi and Giovanni Fattori. In 1910 he entered and won a contest for a poster themed “Today We Fly.” In 1911 he moved to Rome which was to become his adoptive home town to work in the setting of the International Fine Arts Exhibit, planned for the fiftieth anniversary of Italian unity. By request of Federico Ballaster (father of his future colleague Anselmo Ballaster, his peer), he began his career as a commercial artist in Enrico Guazzoni’s new lithographic print shop. Guazzoni, the future director of Quo Vadis (1913), had grasped the importance and potential of industrial poster production, as seen during an Art Applied to Industry Exhibit in Turin. Thus Martinati began to work his way up as a commercial poster designer, transferring Ballaster’s poster sketches, one for each color, onto stone slabs (the printing plate of the era).

In the following years he drifted from his main field, cinema posters, to advertising posters, which ranged in subject matter from consumer goods to sports (like the 1934 World Soccer Championship), without shirking some forays into propaganda posters for the Fascist Regime (such as the 1933 Crociera aerea del decennale, i.e. “Tenth-Anniversary Air Cruise”). The poster that made Italy’s participation in WWII official (L’Italia spezza le catene che la soffocano nel suo mare, i.e. “Italy Breaks the Chains Stifling It In Its Sea,” June 1940), bears his signature. In this period, Martinati stood out for his vivid colors and pivoting subjects, achieved through his technique of tempera on cardboard, with simple outlines and shading. In conjunction with movie production of the 1930s, he busied himself with commissions from Warner Brothers, MGM, the Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche (National Cinema Corporation), and Anonima Pittaluga. From 1939 to 1940, when the Regime restricted American film imports, he switched patrons and began working for Artisti Associati, ICI, Sangraf, Tirrenia, GeneralCine, Minerva, FilmUnion (UFA), and ACI/Europa. To compensate, immediately after the War he illustrated posters for Russian movies distributed by GDB, such as Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great. From late 1945 to 1958, he worked almost exclusively for Warner Brothers, very occasionally doing a piece for Columbia and Universal Studios.

His best-known and most admired posters, for Casablanca, Captain Blood, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep, are from these years. In 1952, while his colleagues celebrated the fortieth anniversary of his career as a poster artist, he founded a yearly prize for cinema poster designers most worthy in art and technique. The prize is called the Spiga Cambellotti, because it resembled the “spiga,” i.e. ear of wheat, that Duilio Cambellotti, who took part in the initiative, used in his signature. After leaving Warner Bros., he worked sporadically in the following years for various brands Cineriz, Euro International, Universal, Colombia, Dear, Lux, Filmar until 1967, when he vanished from the scene. In a 1978 interview, the master said he was disappointed with his colleagues, whom he had tried to involve in an association to safeguard their profession. This dejection may be one of the reasons he did not keep any part of his immense output: when he left Warner Bros., he did not take his sketches. Rumor has it that he even tore up his remaining sketches after closing up shop. At the end of his journey through cinema, he reverted without remorse to his original element, painting, harking back to his teacher, Fattori, and to the historic Macchiaioli style. He died at the age of 90 in 1983.

By Armando Giuffrida