The Trickster in the Wings: Harlequin from Commedia dell’Arte to the Ballet Stage
You know the costume—those diamond-patterned patches, the mask, the nimble silhouette. You may have seen him dart across a ballet stage. But the figure you’re looking at is considerably older and stranger than he appears. Harlequin has been with us for over seven hundred years,
and in that time he has been a devil, a servant, a romantic hero, a painter’s alter ego, and a mechanical doll who comes to life. He is one of the most traveled characters in Western art
history, and he is hiding in plain sight in one of the most performed ballets in the world.
The Devil in Patches
Before he wore diamonds, Harlequin wore rags. His earliest known appearance on stage dates to 1262—in a secular French comedy, the Jeu de la Feuillée by Adam de la Halle—as a masked and hooded devil. His name itself points back to Hellequin, a medieval French demon who led a
nocturnal procession of devils, driving the damned souls of the wicked to hell. This is not the Harlequin of the ballet stage, the quick-footed charmer chasing Columbine through the wings. This is something older and darker.
By the time the Italian Commedia dell’arte codified him in the sixteenth century, the demonic origins had been submerged—but not entirely forgotten. Harlequin became the archetypal zanni, the comic servant: associated with the city of Bergamo, popularized in Paris in the 1580s
by the actor Tristano Martinelli, and defined by a specific constellation of traits. He was cowardly and superstitious, perpetually short of money and food, and yet—somehow—always the most
dangerous person in the room. Nimble, witty, amorous, he was the servant who consistently outwitted his masters, the trickster who bent the rules of whatever world he found himself in. His costume evolved from literal poverty—ragged patches, the clothing of someone who owned nothing—into the geometric diamonds we recognize today. The diamonds are a stylization of
destitution. They are glamorized rags.
His love interest was Columbine (often represented by “the ballerina doll”). His antagonist was whoever held power. And his central quality—the one that would carry him across five centuries
and into Picasso’s studio and onto the ballet stage—was his refusal to stay in any single category. He was human but moved like something not quite human. He was a servant with the intelligence of a master. He was a comedian who kept slipping into something resembling grief.
Across Europe
Commedia dell’arte spread across Europe through traveling troupes, and Harlequin traveled with it, shape-shifting as he went. In France, he became a favorite subject of painters—Watteau and Pater both returned to him repeatedly, extracting something elegiac from a figure who was supposed to be purely comic. In England, he became the acrobatic center of pantomime and
harlequinade, a magical entertainer who could transform the world around him with a slap of his slapstick. In each country, in each century, he absorbed something new: servant, romantic hero, outsider artist, symbol of whoever existed at the social margin. This adaptability is the character. Harlequin survives because he cannot be fixed in place.
Picasso’s Alter Ego
The richest chapter of Harlequin’s afterlife may be the one least expected: the painter’s studio. Picasso returned to Harlequin throughout his career—across the Blue Period, the Rose Period, and beyond—with an identification that went beyond artistic interest. In his early works, Harlequin appears in a melancholy guise, reflecting the artist’s own suffering and loneliness: the performer between performances, the mask set aside, the face beneath it uncertain. After the First World War, the figure shifted becoming a symbol of rebirth and abundance, the trickster who had come through. The identification made sense. Picasso—a Spaniard in Paris, an outsider by geography and temperament—saw in Harlequin a mirror. Both were wanderers. Both performed for audiences who didn’t entirely understand them. Both wore masks that were also, somehow, their truest faces. Juan Gris and Cézanne also painted Harlequin; across the Cubist and Post-Impressionist movements, the character became a shorthand for the artist’s own fragmented, doubled identity—the self that performs and the self that watches.
In 1917, Picasso painted a Harlequin that was also a portrait. His subject was Léonide Massine—the dancer and choreographer of the Ballets Russes. That same year, Picasso designed the sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes’ Parade. The painting is a hinge point: it is the moment when Harlequin, the Commedia servant, the painter’s alter ego, steps directly onto the ballet stage.
A Character Who Was Always a Dancer
This was not entirely new. Harlequin had always been a dancer as much as an actor—physical
agility and acrobatics were central to the role from its earliest incarnations. In eighteenth-century
England, the theatrical producer John Rich incorporated Harlequin into dance pantomimes,
cementing what the character had always implied: that this was a body-based art, that the
trickster’s power was physical.
When the Commedia characters migrated into ballet—Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot finding
their way into a theatrical vocabulary that ballet had partly inherited from the same Italian
tradition—it was a homecoming as much as an adoption. Stravinsky understood this. Both
Petrushka and Pulcinella are direct descendants of the Commedia world: puppet figures, servants, outsiders, characters who blur the line between human and object. Pulcinella (1920)
makes the connection explicit—Pulcinella is a direct Commedia character, a cousin of Harlequin
from the same tradition, and Picasso designed the costumes.
The thread runs clean: from the Italian street troupes of the sixteenth century, through the
French painters, through Picasso’s studio and his portrait of Massine, and directly into the ballet
repertoire.
The Doll Who Comes to Life
Which brings us to the first act of The Nutcracker.
Harlequin appears there as one of the mechanical dolls—a deliberate Commedia reference
embedded in a story already saturated with theatrical magic and transformation. His
appearance is brief. But it is loaded.
He is, literally, a toy who comes to life. And that is exactly what Harlequin has always done
across five centuries of art and performance: slipped between categories. Between human and
not-quite-human. Between servant and master. Between comedy and something that sits closer
to grief. He is the figure who animates—who makes the inanimate move, who makes the fixed
unstable, who turns a stage full of objects into a world.
The Commedia scholar, the art historian, the dance audience member: they are all watching the
same figure when they watch Harlequin in Act One. He carries all of that history in those few
minutes onstage—from the secular comedy devil of 1262 to the melancholy alter ego of
Picasso’s Blue Period to the acrobat of the English pantomime to the dancer Massine, posed in
motley, caught in oil.
He appears in Dante. He appears in Picasso. He appears in Stravinsky. And he appears in the
first act of one of the most performed ballets in the world. Next time you see him on stage, you’ll
know who you’re really looking at.
Want to see the Harlequin in real time? Or maybe you’d like to be IN the performance?!
NUTCRACKER! Magical Christmas Ballet youth auditions are coming up (age 6-18). Find
auditions and tickets in a city near you.
