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 venue, the Folies-Nouvelles, which attracted the fashionable and artistic set, unlike the Funambules’ working-class children of paradise. Such an audience was not averse to pantomimic experiment, and at mid-century "experiment" very often meant Realism. (The pre-"Bovary" Gustave Flaubert wrote a pantomime for the Folies-Nouvelles, "Pierrot in the Seraglio" [1855], which was never produced.) Legrand often appeared in realistic costume, his chalky face his only concession to tradition, leading some advocates of pantomime, like Gautier, to lament that he was betraying the character of the type. But it was the Pierrot as conceived by Legrand that had the greatest influence on