Giuseppe Ciaranfi

In 1881 a young Bulgarian called Anton Mitov, who had worked two years as a telegraph operator to save the fare, enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and was placed in Giuseppe Ciaranfi's class. Fifteen years later Mitov was among the founders of the national art academy in Sofia, where he taught drawing, perspective and the history of art.

Ciaranfi held the chair of painting in Florence from 1876 and kept it for the rest of his life. Angiolo Tommasi, Cesare Laurenti, Alfredo Müller and Cesare Ciani all passed through the same room, as did a second Bulgarian, Petko Klisurov.

He had arrived there himself by the ordinary route. Born in Pistoia in 1838, he studied with the painter Enrico Pollastrini, was admitted to the academy's life class in 1859, and made his debut three years later with the picture the Galleria d'arte moderna in Palazzo Pitti still holds, Benedetto Varchi reading his history of Florence aloud to Cosimo I de' Medici. In 1866 Victor Emmanuel II commissioned him to paint an earlier Savoy ruler, Victor Amadeus II, relieving the poor, and in 1892 he painted a Savonarola that became one of his best-known pictures. He showed at the Glaspalast in Munich in 1901 and died in Florence on 18 January the following year.