Until April 12, 2026, the Uffizi Galleries present the first major exhibition dedicated to Florentine collections of wax sculpture from the 16th and 17th centuries
From 18 December 2025 to 12 April 2026, the Uffizi Galleries opens a fascinating chapter of Florentine collecting with Cera una volta. I Medici e le arti della ceroplastica (“Wax upon a time. The Medici and the arts of ceroplastics”), the first exhibition in the museum entirely devoted to artistic wax production. The show is hosted in newly created ground floor galleries and brings together around ninety works, spanning wax sculptures alongside paintings, hardstone objects, cameos and more, to reconstruct a world that was once celebrated and then largely dispersed.
Why wax, and why now
Wax is paradoxical: incredibly lifelike, intimate, and technically demanding, yet fragile and historically underestimated. The exhibition’s core idea is to restore wax to its rightful place in the history of sculpture, showing how, in Medici Florence, it could rival more “official” artistic media in virtuosity and emotional impact.
A key thread is also historical: much of this refined production was scattered after a major sale ordered in 1783 by Pietro Leopoldo di Lorena, which helped push this art form into the shadows. Seeing so many pieces together again is part of the exhibition’s point, and part of its power.
INSPIRATION
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What you will see, room by room
Curated by Valentina Conticelli, Andrea Daninos and Simone Verde, the exhibition unfolds as a journey through themes and genres that made wax irresistible to collectors, from portraiture to devotional imagery, from beauty to mortality.
- Origins and memory: funerary masks and Renaissance casting practices anchor the story, including the famous death mask of Lorenzo de’ Medici.
- Polychrome wax in the 1500s: vivid, colored wax pieces that feel surprisingly contemporary in their realism, once displayed in celebrated Medici settings.
- The “Novissimi”: a dramatic Baroque focus on the “last things” (death, judgment, hell, paradise), where wax becomes the perfect medium for intense, unsettling storytelling.
- A full room for Gaetano Giulio Zumbo: the show culminates with the Sicilian master who worked in Florence in the 1690s. His macabre, anatomical tableaux push wax to extremes of detail and meaning, confronting time, disease and decomposition with startling immediacy.
