The Uffizi Galleries announce Wax Upon a Time. The Medici and the Arts of Ceroplastics, a must-see exhibition running from 18 December 2025 to 12 April 2026 in the new ground-floor spaces. Curated by Valentina Conticelli and Andrea Daninos, the show inaugurates a focused look at Florence’s wax sculptural legacy, highlighting pieces produced between the 16th and 17th centuries.
A playful gateway to a vanished craft, the title of the show nods to the Italian cera (wax) and c’era (there was), invoking the cadence of a tale as old as the Medici era. The curators describe the aim as reviving a largely forgotten atelier culture: “the production of images in wax,” whose fragile nature has left a sparse but revealing record. Our earliest written witness to such practice comes from Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia, which hints at ancestral customs—likely rooted in Etruscan death masks—that later evolved into ancestor portraits and devotional simulacra. Wax, soft and pliant, enabled Renaissance and Baroque hands to render faces and bodies with lifelike immediacy and polychromy, preserving a kind of living presence even as time erodes the material.
In Baroque Florence, where time itself seemed to accelerate, bees’ wax offered a material perfectly suited to capturing both the vitality and the transience of the human form. The exhibition argues that wax achieved its greatest virtuosity not only for shrines and princely collections but also as a means of deepest personal and spiritual expression. “Wax was able to give substance to faces and bodies in the form of enduring images,” the team notes, inviting visitors to contemplate a medium that once populated both sacred spaces and private alcoves of power.
Among the works on view, a dedicated room foregrounds the late 17th century’s preeminent wax sculptor in Florence: Gaetano Giulio Zumbo. A recent acquisition by the Galleries anchors this focus, presenting The Corruption of the Bodies—an emblematic theme in Zumbo’s oeuvre and a testament to the artist’s singular ability to translate wax into emotionally charged, morally probing forms. This loan, alongside a broader ensemble of about 90 pieces and loans from other institutions, promises a panoramic view of wax sculpture alongside associated works in painting, sculpture, cameos, and gemstone carvings.
The exhibition also revisits historic display contexts once used at the Tribuna of the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace. Some works had left the collections in the late 18th century, only to return to the museum after many decades. In addition to the Zumbo room, visitors will encounter notable items such as the “Howling soul in Hell” (Anima urlante all’Inferno), attributed to Giulio de’ Grazia, and the renowned plaster funerary mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent, crafted by Orsino Benintendi. These pieces illuminate a tradition in which wax-sculptural imagery occupied a crucial, though often overlooked, position within Florentine and European late-Baroque sensibilities.
Simone Verde, Director of the Uffizi Galleries, frames the project as a cultural and scholarly reawakening: “A true cultural and academic event, this exhibition will allow visitors to rediscover an entire area of artistic creation—one unknown to the general public and nearly wholly forgotten outside the restricted circle of specialists.” He emphasizes the paradox at the heart of the venture: a creative universe that has long straddled the border between popular taste and scholarly erudition, between sacred mysticism and artistic invention. The decision to present the show nocturnally—“as if to evoke the subterranean underworld where disappeared souls and visions dwell”—offers visitors an immersive, time-twisting experience. “The Uffizi Galleries are therefore offering their visiting public a journey through time, culture, and the most intimate sensibility of late-Baroque Florence and Europe.”
As Wax Upon a Time opens its doors, it invites contemporary audiences to walk among the remnants of a wax-centered world that once shimmered at the heart of Florentine cultural life. The exhibition promises not only exquisite objects but a renewed conversation about materials, memory, and the ways in which art preserves what time would otherwise erase.
Photo credits: The Uffizi Galleries
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