Frederick Stibbert

Frederick Stibbert (9 November 1838 – 10 April 1906) was an English art collector and businessman, although he was born in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. His figure is mainly linked to the work to which he dedicated his entire life, the Stibbert Museum, gathering a collection of the most disparate genres of art and applied arts, with particular regard to the collection of ancient weapons and armors, among the most conspicuous and important in the world of its kind. His name is also spelled Federigo or Federico Stibbert.

Biography Stibbert was born in Florence, but was a British citizen. He was the son of Thomas Stibbert (1771-1847), an English military colonel of the Coldstream Guards, and Giulia Cafaggi (1805-1883), a young Tuscan woman. The Stibbert family was very wealthy, originally from Norfolk: Stibbert's grandfather, Giles Stibbert (1734-1809), was general commander in the East India Company and governor of Bengal.

The armory initially represented the dominant sector of its interests, with a preference for Japanese weapons during the last part of its life. In particular for each type of weapon Stibbert thought of some real scenographic contexts: he studied appropriate mannequins on which to mount arms and armor and set up and decorated the rooms in order to make them suitable to what was contained. More generally, he restructured his residence and reorganized it from the perspective of the museum (today there are 64 rooms on two floors, for a total of 5,000 m2). The result was a hybrid in which the rooms of daily life merged with those of the collections, this means that there was not a part of the villa used as a dwelling and another used as an exhibition place, but that the house was the museum and the museum was the house. Over time he extended his passion for collecting to paintings, goldsmith's work, porcelains, costumes, fabrics, furnishing objects and books.