Vertumnus and Pomona

The story comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Roman poet's book of transformations. Pomona was a nymph who cared only for her orchards and kept every suitor out of them. Vertumnus, a god of the changing seasons who could take any shape he liked, finally got in disguised as an old woman, and talked to her about love until he could drop the disguise.

Goltzius painted the moment of that conversation, in 1613. Pomona reclines naked under an apple tree with a pruning knife, the tool of her orchard, and holds a grapevine in her right hand. Apples, pears and grapes spill across the foreground. The old woman bending over her is Vertumnus, and the Rijksmuseum points out the one thing that gives him away, a walking stick planted suggestively between Pomona's legs.