The exhibition aims to illustrate, through photographs and oriental art objects collected by Frederick Stibbert, the fascination for exoticism in European interiors from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present day.
Taken by great photographers, such as Daniel Harlingue, or Dornac, some images give us unprecedented glimpses of the interiors inhabited by artists, writers, diplomats and dandies.
The exhibition aims to be a story of the diversity of attitudes and views of European and Florentine society towards everything that came from afar: living surrounded by exotic objects must in fact have taken on a different meaning for a French consul in China at the end of the last century or for a Parisian art dealer friend of the Cubists, or for Peggy Guggenheim who placed works of contemporary art next to African objects in her Venetian palace. Similarly, Frederick Stibbert, followed by some of his contemporaries, loved to surround himself with works from all over the world in a spectacular setting of his home which also influenced taste and lifestyles, making his Florentine villa one of these "spaces of the most fascinating frontiers.