Robert and Judi Newman Center for Performing Arts of the Department of Theatre's Byron Theatre, was also designed and carved by Denver artists Madeline Wiener and Kathy Caricof. This sculpture depicts three characters from the Commedia Dell’Arte, Italian quasi-improvisational theater popular during the Renaissance. Colombina (Columbine), who hides behind Arlecchino (Harlequin), is demure and gentle, while Arlecchino gestures to the throne on which passers-by can sit to join the audience. The smaller figure represents Pantalone, a miserly, scheming masked character in tattered clothing. He clutches a purse, out of which coins are falling. Note also the hat on the ground that is filled with coins, as if the
Pierrot French Patois, when those dialects were common currency—as he circulates through the crowds. Around the mid-twentieth century, he traveled about in pairs or larger groups, contending for supremacy among his companions, but by the dawn of the twenty-first century, he had become rather solitary, a vestige of his former gregarious self. Pierrot Pierrot (, ; ) is a stock character of pantomime and "commedia dell'arte" whose origins are in the late seventeenth-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne; the name is a diminutive of "Pierre" (Peter), via the suffix "-ot." His character in contemporary