Giuseppe Palanti (30 July 1881 – 23 April 1946) was an Italian painter, illustrator, and urban planner, best known for his portraits, notably of Mussolini and Pius XI.

He had a long collaboration with Teatro alla Scala in Milan, creating costume, set design and advertising material for multiple opera productions.

[1] Consequently, was awarded a study trip by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce which sent him to Paris to follow the Exposition Universelle, an experience that would influence his style, notably the exhibition pavilions and their advertising billboards.

[3] He wrote a detailed account of his interest in poster design, especially the floral work of Alphonse Mucha,[4] and in the technical solutions of art applied to this industry.

On graduating in 1901, he was invited by Cavenaghi[1] to teach advanced composition at the School of Applied Art (corso Superiore di composizione) at the Brera Academy, which he would continue to do for ten years.

Palanti continued to design and illustrate the covers of sales catalogues for Milanese department stores from 1901 to 1912, working for the Italian Cooperative Union.

In 1924 In the post war period, he began to produce prolific work for private clients amongst the Milanese bourgeoisie looking for portraiture, and occupied a role few contemporaries were offering.

[14] He was an illustrator who produced graphics for posters and book covers, in addition to creating sketches for costume and set design for the Teatro alla Scala.

[14] His modernity looked to the strength, safety and joy of a middle and upper bourgeois class at the beginning of the twentieth century: industrialists, professionals, ladies of high society, who enjoyed a confident pre-war Italy in economic growth.

[3] Almost all of his activity, over the years, was oriented towards applied art, without however encroaching on a purely technical style, as in the case of graphics, inclined as he was instead to decorative solutions expressed in pictorial terms.

Rich and multifaceted interventions in the so-called minor arts, from designs for fabrics to ceramics from Faenza, to stained glass windows, to wrought iron, to the applications of leather and metals for Ceruti furniture, to collaborations with the architect Gaetano Moretti.

[16] His pupils included Pina Sacconaghi, Francesco Carini,[17] Carlo Ceci,[18] Augusto Colombo,[19] Goliardo Padova[20] and Sigismondo Martini.