Pomona

This female nude bronze in the round, with neither arms nor head and with slightly pronounced breasts, the body's weight supported on the right leg with the left leg extended slightly, represents the ancient goddess Pomona. The Etruscan god of fertility, in Ancient Rome Pomona became the god of fruitful abundance and in traditional iconography was represented holding an apple.

Between 1935 and 1950, Marino Marini dedicated himself to producing numerous variants of this subject across a range of mediums, from drawings and paintings to sculptures. This sculpture was carried out in 1941 along with two replicas, one of which is in the collection of the Musée Roayaux des Beaux Arts in Brussels. The artist interprets Pomona as Mother Nature, a mythical and archetypal figure offering the perfect model to represent a serene and idyllic natural world. With this series, Marini finds his ideal style to express his sculptural language aimed at rekindling a deep relationship with Mediterranean and specifically Italian and Tuscan classicism.

The artist described his work thus: “My Pomonas inhabit a bright and sunny world of poetry, humanity, abundance and great sensuality. They represent a happy season broken by the tragic times of war. In all of these images, femininity is explored in its most remote, inescapable and mysterious forms: it is a type of unavoidable necessity, static immovability, and primitive and unconscious fertility” (Marini in De Micheli 1999, cit. in M. Tamassia, in Memorie dell’antico nell’arte del Novecento 2009, n. 43, p. 163).

The work was donated by the artist to the Gallery of the Statues and Paintings of the Uffizi in 1987 and is exhibited in San Pier Scheraggio.