Vertumnus and Pomona (Pontormo)
Encyclopedia
The fresco
Fresco
Fresco is any of several related mural painting types, executed on plaster on walls or ceilings. The word fresco comes from the Greek word affresca which derives from the Latin word for "fresh". Frescoes first developed in the ancient world and continued to be popular through the Renaissance...

 decoration of Vertumnus and Pomona in the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano
Poggio a Caiano
Poggio a Caiano is a town and comune in the Province of Prato, Tuscany region Italy. The town lies 9 km south of the provincial capital of Prato.-The Medici villa:...

 (near Montalbano
Montalbano
The term Montalbano can be referred to:*Bartolomeo Montalbano Italian Baroque Musician*Inspector Montalbano Sicilian fictional detective*Montalbano Elicona a comune in Sicily, Italy...

) is a masterpiece by Jacopo Pontormo. The villa is set among orchards and gardens, and served in summer as an outdoor respite to the heat in Florence.

The fresco surrounds a lunette
Lunette
In architecture, a lunette is a half-moon shaped space, either filled with recessed masonry or void. A lunette is formed when a horizontal cornice transects a round-headed arch at the level of the imposts, where the arch springs. If a door is set within a round-headed arch, the space within the...

, high in a barrel-vaulted central hall. The allegorical
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...

 figures over the doors and the facing fresco depicting Julius Caesar, begun by Pontormo’s mentor, Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto
Andrea del Sarto was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori , his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci,...

, were completed decades later by Alessandro Allori
Alessandro Allori
Alessandro di Cristofano di Lorenzo del Bronzino Allori was an Italian portrait painter of the late Mannerist Florentine school....

. Pontormo initially received the commission from Ottaviano de' Medici
Ottaviano de' Medici
Ottaviano de' Medici was an Italian politician and statesman, ancestor of the Princes of Ottaiano line of the Medici family....

 and Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Clement VII, and Giovanni de’ Medici (later pope as Leo X).

The painting depicts peasants, including a naked youth, picking fruit or lounging beneath trees in a walled framework. Putti garland the window. The stated theme is the classical myth of Vertumnus
Vertumnus
In Roman mythology, Vertumnus — also Vortumnus or Vertimnus — is the god of seasons, change and plant growth, as well as gardens and fruit trees...

 and Pomona
Pomona
Pomona was a goddess of fruitful abundance in ancient Roman religion and myth. Her name comes from the Latin word pomum, "fruit," specifically orchard fruit. She was said to be a wood nymph and a part of the Numia, guardian spirits who watch over people, places, or homes...

 taken from a story in Ovid's Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses (poem)
Metamorphoses is a Latin narrative poem in fifteen books by the Roman poet Ovid describing the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose mythico-historical framework. Completed in AD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature...

. The myth is that of Pomona, a beautiful but haughty wood-nymph, with the sickle at right lower corner, sheltered herself inside her orchard, dedicating herself to its cultivation while spurning all suitors. Vertumnus, either a demigod of seasons or a satyr
Satyr
In Greek mythology, satyrs are a troop of male companions of Pan and Dionysus — "satyresses" were a late invention of poets — that roamed the woods and mountains. In myths they are often associated with pipe-playing....

, is taken with the nymph's beauty, but she ignores and rebuffs all his advances to enter her realm. The mutable Vertumnus gains access to the orchard disguised or transformed into an old woman (here, an old man with basket). Once inside the disguised Vertumnus convinces the maiden, by means of allusive stories, to "carpe diem
Carpe diem
Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace that has become an aphorism. It is popularly translated as "seize the day"...

" and choose the handsome youth Vertumnus, who finally reveals his true form.

One reading of this fresco is that the allegory delicately counterposes the turns in the story in a mirror fashion in each hemi-lunette. The elder-faced Vertumnus with the rapt Pomona, the youth with basket and the turning maiden, and finally aloft on the fence, the naked man picking fruit from the same tree for which from a distance the maiden, clothed in an aroused red dress, tenders a branch. It is an elaborately seductive interpretation for this fresco made for a then Papal family.

It is an apt arrangement for this rural farm. It lacks the usual melancholy of Pontormo's religious canvases, and thus is unique among his works. In some ways, this painting is aberrant in the prevailing current of Florentine painting of its time. Florentine painting, if not portraiture, was often intellectual and academic, and focused on allegory, mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...

 or religious themes. Genre topics and still lifes were rare for the high-minded Florentines. In addition, nearly all Italian painting until that time occurred indoors or in urban landscapes, and if not, landscape was unmemorable sfumato
Sfumato
Sfumato is one of the four canonical painting modes of the Renaissance .The most prominent practitioner of sfumato was Leonardo da Vinci, and his famous painting of the Mona Lisa exhibits the technique. Leonardo da Vinci described sfumato as "without lines or borders, in the manner of smoke or...

dissipating in the distance. The Summer or Spring evoked by the reposing figures is powerful as well as soothing. The theme of the relaxed near-genre scene gently harkens for fertility.

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