In Roman mythology, Vertumnus (also Vortumnus or Vertimnus) is the god of seasons, change, and plant growth, as well as gardens and fruit trees. He could change his form at will; in Ovid's Metamorphoses he wins the orchard goddess Pomona by disguising himself as an old woman and telling the cautionary tale of Iphis and Anaxarete. His festival, the Vertumnalia, was held on 13 August. Ancient authors connected him with Etruscan Voltumna of Volsinii.
Adapted from Wikipedia, "Vertumnus" · CC BY-SA 4.0
I.Cult and origin
Varro held Vortumnus to be Etruscan and a principal god of Etruria; Propertius likewise brings him from Volsinii. The cult reached Rome around 300 BC, and a temple on the Aventine is attested by 264 BC, when Volsinii fell to Rome. Propertius credits a bronze statue by the legendary Mamurius Veturius that replaced an ancient maple xoanon said to date from Romulus' time.
The signum Vortumni stood in a simple shrine on the Vicus Tuscus near the Forum and was decorated according to the changing seasons. Propertius' elegy lets the statue speak in the first person to passers-by. The statue base, found in 1549 and since lost, bore a Diocletianic restoration inscription.
II.Myth of Pomona
Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 14) tells how Vertumnus loved Pomona, guardian of fruit trees who barred men from her orchard. He approached in many disguises — harvester, reaper, vine-dresser — and finally as an old woman who gained entry, kissed the nymph, and warned her against scorning a suitor through the embedded tale of Iphis and Anaxarete. Dropping the crone's mask, he won her. The episode has been called the first exclusively Latin tale.
Ovid himself notes that the kisses Vertumnus gave were never those of a true old woman. Modern readers diverge: some see a movement from coercion toward mutual desire in a civilized Latian landscape; others stress diction of deception, veiled threat, and a silenced Pomona.
III.Reception
Vertumnus and Pomona appealed to European sculptors and painters from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries as a scene of erotic disguise contrasting youthful beauty with an aged crone — a cousin to Jupiter wooing Callisto as Diana. The subject entered tapestry series of the Loves of the Gods (Brussels mid-sixteenth century; Boucher designs for Gobelins, 1775–1778).
Mme de Pompadour played Pomona in a Versailles pastoral; Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne's 1760 sculpture alludes to the performance. Camille Claudel sculpted a marble Vertumnus and Pomona (1905). Giuseppe Arcimboldo's Vertumnus (c. 1590) depicts Rudolf II as the god of seasonal plenty; Joseph Brodsky wrote a poem on Vertumnus.