Anatolio Scifoni

Biography of Anatolio Scifoni ( 1841-1884 )

Anatolio Scifoni was an Italian painter, born in Florence in 1841. Son of the poet Luigi Scifoni and the painter Ida Botti Scifoni, the young boy grew up between artists and intellectuals. Ida Botti was famous for landscape and portrait painting and was the art teacher of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte who was Emperor Napoleon’s niece. 

The young artist began to learn at the Academy Albertina in Turin, before entering the Fine-Art Institute of Moscow and then improving his art in Paris and Rome. He became friend with painter Lorenzo Delleani during his stays in Turin. From 1860 to 1866, he exhibited at the Salon in Turin, where he gained his first successes. He definitively settled in Rome in 1870 and changed his style to adopt an “archeological” painting. Greatly influenced by the Ancient civilization of the peninsula, he travelled to Pompeii many times. From then on, we can see in his painting women in toga and genre scene in the Ancient taste, mixing precision and delicacy. A large public enjoyed his bright works that he exhibited in Paris, Rome, as well as in London, Vienna or Philadelphia.

His acquaintance with some members of the royal family allowed him to obtain some orders from the court that helped him to become an unmissable painter in the Italian capital. He became knight of the Order of the Crown Italy, a recompense created in 1868 by king Victor-Emmanuel II.