Pyramid of Five Men

In about 1543, Juste de Juste produced a set of five prints of male nudes adopting improbable, convoluted poses, seemingly without any effort. They cannot be acrobats, because their movements are impossible in reality. They look like acrobats who cannot find support for their feet. These rare etchings are executed in a spontaneous but powerful manner, and the series is unquestionably one of the masterpieces of the School of Fontainebleau. A group of artists, among them the Italians Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio, were working in Fontainebleau on a decoration programme for the palace of François I. Juste de Juste was involved as a sculptor. That was in fact his métier, as can be seen from these unusual compositions of elongated and contorted figures, viewed from different angles.

The series was one of several surprises in the collection of 3000 prints, which the collector Adriaan Domela Nieuwenhuis donated to the museum in 1923. Nieuwenhuis was mainly interested in sixteenth-century Italian prints and the works of great masters like Dürer, Rembrandt and Goya.