The Sculptors of Speed and the Dream of Leonardo da Vinci has opened at the Galleria delle Carrozze, Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence, bringing together Renaissance craft, early engineering and the aluminium bodywork traditions behind some of Italy’s most significant sports and racing cars.
The exhibition runs until June 28, 2026, and examines the links between Florentine 15th-century armourers, Leonardo da Vinci’s studies into stored energy, the internal-combustion work of Eugenio Barsanti and Felice Matteucci, and the Modenese battilastra masters who shaped bodies for Ferrari, Maserati and other manufacturers during the 1950s and 1960s. The project has been organised with Scuderia Belle Curve, a collectors’ club founded ten years ago by Mauro Bertoli, Vincenzo Iannelli, Stefano Lazzeri and Filippo Francioni, and is supported by the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Florence, the Barsanti and Matteucci Foundation in Lucca and the Institute of the Shields of San Martino.
The Sculptors of Speed exhibition is based around 15 pieces from the ModenArt Collection, a project created by Jean-Marc Borel to preserve and present hand-beaten aluminium bodywork and the iron filoni structures used as full-size forming guides. The exhibition is curated by Scuderia Belle Curve’s Mauro Bertoli. Its display places the Modenese bodywork tradition within a longer Italian craft history. It draws a line from armour made for 15th-century knights to the forming of lightweight aluminium bodies for competition cars, with Leonardo’s mechanical studies and the Barsanti-Matteucci engine used as connecting points in that narrative.
“To see, within a single exhibition, the secrets of the Renaissance armourers alongside the bodywork of the most beautiful automobiles in the world allows us to understand the depth of our history,” said Jean Marc Borel. “This exhibition celebrates the ‘poets of aluminium’ who, inspired by the genius of the Renaissance and Leonardo’s dream, succeeded in giving speed a concrete and immortal form.”
Mauro Bertoli (pictured above, bottom right) added: “We wanted to create a bridge spanning more than 500 years. We begin with the protection ofmasters are the custodians of this Italian heritage: without that ancient knowledge, the dream of speed would never have acquired the extraordinary forms admired throughout the world today.”
The Sculptors of Speed focuses on the craftsmen who worked in Modena for companies including Scaglietti, Fantuzzi and Sports Cars, such as Afro Gibellini (pictured top left in the earlier photograph grouping), Giancarlo Guerra, Fernando Baccarini and Oriello Leonardi. The exhibition references bodies and forms associated with cars such as the Ferrari Testa Rossa and GTO, the Maserati 450S and Birdcage, and the Shelby Cobra.
The choice of Palazzo Medici Riccardi gives the exhibition a direct connection to Florence’s Renaissance history. This building was the first Medici palace in the city and was associated with Cosimo de’ Medici and Lorenzo the Magnificent before passing to the Riccardi family in 1659.
More details can be found here.
