Pyramid of Six Men

Juste de Juste came from a family of artists of Florentine extraction, and worked under Rosso Fiorentino, the artist charged with the decoration of Francis I’s palace at Fontainebleau in the 1530s. Like other artists in Rosso’s employ at this time, Juste was trained as a draftsman and painter and not as a printmaker. Partly for this reason, unlike the skilled and measured technique of prominent Italian and German engravers of this decade, Juste de Juste and the other printmakers at Fontainebleau seem to have been given much greater license in the creation of their etchings. To be sure, in technical terms these prints often demonstrate an incomplete understanding of printmaking methods; however, the immediacy and artistic verve of the prints of Fontainebleau were unparalleled in their day and caused them to be distributed all over Europe. This amusing jumble of bodies is not related to any of the palace decorations at Fontainebleau; rather, Juste seems simply to have turned his long study of human anatomy into a freely interpreted academic exercise, creating a complex recombination of muscular human forms that barely fit (bumping heads, hands, knees, and elbows) within the dimensions of his copper plate. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)