Vertumnus and Pomona (Pontormo)

Vertumnus and Pomona is a fresco decoration in the Medici country villa at Poggio a Caiano (near Montalbano), executed c. 1519–1521 by Jacopo Pontormo.

The allegorical figures over the doors and the facing fresco depicting Julius Caesar, begun by Pontormo’s mentor, Andrea del Sarto, were completed decades later by Alessandro Allori.

The myth is that of Pomona, a beautiful but aloof wood-nymph, shown with a sickle at right lower corner, who sheltered herself inside her orchard, dedicating herself to its cultivation while spurning all suitors.

Vertumnus, either a demigod of seasons or a satyr, becomes taken with the nymph's beauty, but she ignores and rebuffs all his advances to enter her realm and remains a maiden.

One interpretation of this fresco is that the allegory delicately counterposes the turns in the myth using a mirror fashion in each hemi-lunette by depicting a contrast of the elder-faced Vertumnus with the rapt Pomona, the youth with a basket and a turning maiden, and finally, the naked man aloft on the fence picking fruit from the same tree from which, at a distance, the maiden trims a branch while clothed in a red dress that suggests arousal.