Lot 1034 | Pomona Lying on the Waterfront in Front of a Moated Castle

LUDOVICO POZZOSERRATO
('Lodewijk Toeput')
ca. 1550 Antwerp - ca. 1605 Treviso


attributed
Title: Pomona Lying on the Waterfront in Front of a Moated Castle.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Mounting: Relined.
Measurement: 69,5 x 55,5cm.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.
Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

Lodewijk Toeput, also known as Lodovico Pozzoserrato, was a Flemish artist who lived and worked in Italy for many years. After leaving his hometown (Antwerp or Malines), he moved to various Italian centres such as Venice, Florence and Rome and finally settled in Treviso in the early 1580s. Although he executed frescoes, portraits and altarpieces for local churches, he specialized in landscape painting and, together with Paolo Fiammingo, became one of the leading painters for this typology. His soft and delicate style and his articulated compositions, which earned him the praise of Karel Van Mander in his famous Schilder-Boeck ("Book of Painters"), were inspired by the two famous Venetian painters of the time: Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto.

This painting, which for stylistic reasons can be traced back to the hand of Lodovico,
unites both the peculiarities of the artist: elegance in composition and skill in landscape painting. It depicts Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit, the olive tree and the vine. This mythological figure, like other deities rejected in the Middle Ages, reappeared in the Renaissance as the protagonist of numerous pictorial and statuary representations. She is always depicted as a young woman with a horn of plenty or, as in this case, fruits.