An exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery opens the door to wax, on a unique itinerary through the Medici collections, workshops, and age-old traditions.
Wax was widely used in the preparation of sculptures
The exhibition entitled “Wax once. Sculptures from the Medici Collections” will run from 16 December 2025 to 12 April 2026 and is dedicated to the Florentine wax art between the 16th and 17th centuries. At a time when science and art mirrored each other, wax became a tool to reproduce life, to study the body, to evoke the divine. In rooms that once belonged to the Medici, the sculptures reveal how the sculptor's gesture mingles with that of the anatomist. And from these rooms begins a journey that extends beyond Florence, throughout Tuscany: an itinerary of matter, form and knowledge.
Europe’s oldest scientific museum
Just few steps beyond the Uffizi, there is a place that seems to have been born to continue this tale, La Specola, oldest scientific museum in Europe which houses beautiful sculptures as well as an equally surprising collection. that of botanical waxes in an artificial garden of over two hundred plants modelled with such precision as to seem alive, born of that Renaissance curiosity that sought to reproduce nature in order to better understand it.
Wax models and wax used to produce porcelain
But Florence is also the city where wax becomes the first step towards the eternity of bronze. At the Bargello National Museum in the rooms dedicated to Baroque sculpture, the wax models of Benvenuto Cellini, Alessandro Algardi and Massimiliano Soldani Benzi tell of the secret phase of creation: when the artist studies form and light before entrusting everything to the fire of fusion. Those little waxes are like three-dimensional notes, the echo of a thought that still vibrates in the material. And in the nearby Ginori Museum in Sesto Fiorentino wax once again has a different but equally fascinating function: a preparatory material for porcelain, a bridge between the world of artistic workshops and that of manufacturing.
Rediscovering Tuscany through its sculptors an craftsmen
Further south in Siena, in the Leonetto Comparini Anatomical Museum there is a collection that testifies to a passion for knowledge and observation. The anatomical waxes here are skulls, fetuses, body sections, studies of pathology and obstetrics. In Pisa too, among the University's historic lecture halls, wax continues to be a key to understanding the world. The Filippo Civinimi Museum of Human Anatomy displays anatomical models and didactic preparations that trace the genealogy of modern medicine. So wax is not only the protagonist of the Uffizi’s Wax once. Sculptures from the Medici Collections exhibition, but an invitation to rediscover Tuscany on a journey into the living substance of beauty through the hands of its sculptors and the work of its craftsmen.
