Pierrot, from naive Commedia dell'arte valet to complex icon, captures the evolving emotions and roles of the quintessential sad clown.
Pierrot, the sad clown in white face and loose blouse, expressing slowly and subtly in the liminal space beyond words, emerged in the nineteenth century from his roots in stock comedies and pantomimes to become the embodiment of a certain strain of artistic sentiment: sensitive, melancholy, and intrinsically alone, playful and daring through the subversion of language while suggesting the ...
Pierrot, The Lovesick Clown | Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement
Pierrot Lunaire Pierrot in History The character of Pierrot (Pedrolino in his Italian incarnation) was a stock figure in the commedia dell’arte, a type of improvised theatre which flourished in northern Italy and elsewhere in Europe from the sixteenth century forward. Some of the other familiar characters from this genre were Harlequin, the sometimes sinister clown; Columbine, the young ...
Pierrot (/ ˈpɪəroʊ / PEER-oh, US also / ˈpiːəroʊ, ˌpiːəˈroʊ / PEE-ə-roh, PEE-ə-ROH; French: [pjɛʁo] ⓘ) is a stock character of pantomime and commedia dell'arte whose origins date back to the late 17th-century Italian troupe of players performing in Paris and known as the Comédie-Italienne. The name is a diminutive of Pierre (Peter), using the suffix -ot and derives from the ...
He didn't always have it so hard. Pierrot, an invention of the Italian commedia dell'arte troupes who delighted French audiences in Watteau's day, began life as a lazy, buffoonish stock character, the bumpkin foil to his fellow player Harlequin's ingenious trickery. Far from the star of the show, and far from the moonstruck figure who stumbles through the annals of western art, his simple ways ...