Vertumnus and Pomona

This fresco fills a lunette high in the barrel-vaulted central hall of the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano, near Montalbano, a place the family used as a refuge from the summer heat of Florence. Pontormo painted it around 1519-1521, commissioned by members of the family, including the future Clement VII. Its stated subject comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses: Pomona, a beautiful and aloof wood-nymph who shuts herself in her orchard and rejects every suitor, and Vertumnus, a god of the seasons or a satyr, who gets in disguised and eventually wins her over. The scene, however, is set among ordinary rural people picking fruit or resting under the trees, including a naked youth perched on a fence. Many readers see a deliberately seductive undercurrent in this, since the figures mirror one another across the lunette. The work stands apart in Pontormo's output, lacking the melancholy of his religious paintings, and it was unusual in Florentine art, which rarely turned to everyday country life or genre subjects.

Painter

Pontormo

Date

1519

Medium

fresco painting, fresco

Dimensions

461 × 990 cm

Museum

Villa Medici

Genre

mythological painting

Depicts

Vertumnus and Pomona, Vertumnus

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