The Brilliance of Italian Movie Posters

I yield to no man in my respect for the art of photograpy, but in recent years the media has become awash with photographic images, usually very average ones at that. When it came to movie posters I usually found those that relied on photographic depictions of the film and stars to be somewhat flat and unexciting, particularly when compared to the multicolured panache of a high quality painted poster. Yes, there were some bad ones, but just look at how exciting a poster can be, especially in the hands of the talented, often anonymous, Italian artists.