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Pontormo's early success was crowned by the official commissions he received from the Medici court. He took part in the decoration of the salone of the Medicean Villa of Poggio a Caiano, a country villa at the foot of Montalbano much favoured by Lorenzo il Magnifico. He received the commission from Ottaviano de' Medici and Cardinal Giulio de' Medici, the future Clement VII. The iconographical programme, designed by the historian Paolo Giovio, aimed to evoke the celebrations of the Medici house through a series of episodes drawn from Roman history. The theme chosen by the painter is the pictorial representation of the classical myth of Vertumnus and Pomona taken from a story in Ovid's Metamorphosis.
This lunette was painted using only an almost frantic series of sketches as outline. It alludes to the richness and happiness of the harvest season, but the way it does so is most unusual. The characters, unusually individualistic for such a work, are shown at various heights in front of a wall above which sprout long and slender fern-like shoots. The two deities are represented at the two ends of the lower area of the lunette with the same attributes that distinguish them in Ovid's story, the sickle of Pomona and the basket of Vertumnus. They are both wearing peasants clothes, like the other adult figures in the group.
Around the oculus of the window are four naked putti: the lower ones are holding the two ends of a festoon of leaves and fruits, while the two above are sitting on large trunks, from which slender laurel branches grow outwards, holding two standards aloft. A fifth ignudo, a boy, is sitting on the low wall behind the old peasant representing Vertumnus and the young companion sitting beside him. Dangling his legs, he rests his right forearm on the wall and extends his left upwards, raising a pale mauve-coloured cloth to touch a bayleaf. The airy atmosphere and the relaxed attitudes of the figures are those of a peasants' moment of leisure on a hot day of rest. The classical myth is therefore reworked here in a rustic-popularesque way.
The general naturalistic character reaches the height of realism in the portrayal of the peasant Vertumnus, his face furrowed by the ravages of time and his gnarled hands deformed by the hardships of work in the fields. To his right is a skinny dog with a grumpy expression, almost ready to bark, undoubtedly one of the most unusual and bizarre details of the fresco. It was probably the example of northern engravings that inspired Pontormo to develop this particular interest for the re[presentation of the natural world, in which animals and plants have a dignity equal to that of human beings.
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