“Once upon a time.” The Uffizi rediscovers an ancient form of sculpture – Florence – Arte.it

Florence – It has a centuries-old history, but in Medici Florence it reached the pinnacle of virtuosity: it is the art of the wax figure, or ceroplasty, which has now been forgotten. From December 16, 2025 to April 12, 2026 we will have the chance to rediscover it at the Uffizi Gallery, thanks to about 90 works brought together here from numerous Italian and European museums. After exhibitions dedicated to stone painting from the Galleria Borghese in Rome and now fromCarrara Academy from Bergamo, Once upon a time. Sculptures from the Medici collections it reminds us that the mediums and techniques of ancient art were more varied and imaginative than we might think. “This exhibition is a true cultural and scientific event that allows us to rediscover an area of ​​artistic creation unknown to the general public and almost completely forgotten,” he says. Simone Verde, director of the Florentine Museum : “With an installation that we wanted to be nocturnal, almost suggestive of the subterranean world of the underworld, where disappeared souls and visions reside, the Uffizi therefore offers its audience of visitors a journey through time, to the culture and to the most intimate sensibility of Florence and late Baroque Europe”.

Soft and fragrant, the wax produced by bees was modeled by skilled sculptors of the 16th and 17th centuries into polychrome reliefs and statues that resembled life and gave substance to faces and bodies in eternal statues, or almost. Yes, because the reason why most wax figures have been lost is related to the transience of an organic material that is docile in the hands of artists, but also in the face of the destructive effects of time.

Martino Pasqualigo, known as Martino dal Friso, (Milan 1524 – Venice 1580), Leda and the Swan, second half 16th century polychrome wax on painted metal, beads and colored stones 25 x 19 cm, Écouen, Chateau Écouen, Musée National de la Renaissance

The first to leave evidence of the practice of modeling in wax is Pliny the Elder in the Naturalis Historia, who in the first century AD tells of ancestral customs derived from the Etruscan use of death masks, which later became portraits used for the cult of ancestors. The art of washing would remain alive in the popular sensibility – down to the votive offerings that today still depend on the sacred flames of Christian shrines – ultimately finding its moment of glory in Medici Florence between the fifteenth century and the end of the seventeenth century. With the Baroque culture, obsessed with the passage of time, this malleable material that imitates the characteristics of the skin like no other, is exalted in shaping the living body and its decomposition. The wax figures were commissioned by nobles and princes for their collections and achieved a very high degree of virtuosity.

This is the case of the works brought together by the Florentine Exhibition, once exhibited in the Uffizi Gallery and in Palazzo Pitti, which will return home for the first time after being alienated from the Medici collections at the end of the eighteenth century. Among the most interesting pieces are the Soul Crying in Hell, attributed to Giulio de’ Grazia, and the famous funeral mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent, made by the sculptor Orsino Benintendi. An entire room will then be dedicated to the greatest wax sculptor active in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century: Gaetano Giulio Zumbo, author of a work recently acquired by the Uffizi and which will be presented to the public on the occasion of the exhibition. This is the relief The Corruption of Bodies, a masterpiece in the genre in which the baroque theme of transience is expressed in a splatter version.