Inside Renato Zero's Musical and Visual Artistry

He drew from Commedia dell'Arte, opera, circus and Fellini. So please don't call him the Italian David Bowie.

By singing, with equal ease, about musings on threesomes, meditations on humanity as a whole, and meditations on those whom society deems outcasts—topics that were all welcome on what he called il carrozzone (his bandwagon)—Renato Zero (born Renato Fiacchini) remains one of the most, for lack of a better term, polymorphic musical artists of the Italian panorama.

Accompanied by the most flamboyant costumes and full-face makeup, his performances do blend elements of pop, theater, cabaret, varieté, and stagecraft. In fact, his artistic approach is a multidisciplinary statement in its own right, in that he started as a dancer, was shaped by cinema, bore a lifelong fascination with the circus, and dabbled, in equal measure, in pop (from ballads to uptempo songs), art pop, R&B, rock, and disco.

As for his self-presentation, he became willingly known as and ran the gamut from unabashed hedonism and childlike disposition, with monikers including “perverse polymorph” to “merchant of stars” (the …