The great Italian graphic designer Armando Testa began his advertising career in 1937, when he was only 20, with a poster for the Industria Colori Inchiostri (ICI), the Milan manufacturer of inks and varnishes; after the war he established his own small studio that would become the leading Italian advertising agency from 1956. He created clever, often humorous and surreal poster campaigns for such celebrated Italian brands as Peroni, Martini & Rossini, Borsalino, and Punt e Mes vermouth, often featuring a single motif on a light ground. By the 1980s, as in this poster promoting a 1985 Milan exhibition in which international artists were invited to address Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, his compositions had become more fluid and painterly in style.