Free Feet of the Angels by Evelyne de La Chenelière

MARIE 1 at the microphone, holding a sheet of paper. She is nervous, trembling and dry in the mouth.
    MARIE 1
    Let me begin by thanking you, ladies and gentlemen, members of the jury, for having read my work so attentively and also for your comments. Let me express my gratitude and affection to all those who have been generous enough to attend today and share my last moments as a student, officially, I mean.
    She catches her breath, coughs, swallows and tries to relax.
    There are so very many ways to approach the Renaissance: a revolution in all our senses, a conjunction of all types of knowledge, so much an integral part of our lives, our perceptions and all our forms of expression. Our accumulated research has forced us, time after time, to acknowledge the impossibility of embracing the totality of what appears to us as significant, fundamental and enlightening about it. It has been necessary to extract from all this one small aspect of the immeasurable upheaval in an attempt to isolate, at least partially, the fallout from the Renaissance that would forever colour man’s relation to his existence. If the Renaissance is first and foremost a period of great exploration, of the spread of knowledge and the end of obscurantism, it is also paradoxically the time of a disenchantment that echoes the very first humanist values, for this new fascination with the self—a creative self certainly, but no less mortal and limited—is a cult necessarily tinged with melancholy. Such adoration of man by man, at the root of the first self-portraits and artists’ biographies, resonates today more than ever with the boundless glorification of humankind, quite apart from whatever its accomplishments and exploits may be. Thus have we chosen to concentrate on a specific aspect of systematic humanization in Renaissance art, part of what we may call “the archaeology of image” or more precisely, “the archaeology of representation.”
    Before going further, however, let us mention the origin of this interest in a particular detail, which however intimate, constitutes, beyond any personal aspect, an analogy with the thesis… here defended.
    We sense that she is no longer looking at what she has written, her eyes wandering from the paper…
    MARIE 2
    But I changed my mind, that is… I mean… I didn’t really want to be here anymore, talking, drawing you into my subject, defending… I… it seemed more than I could handle. That’s what I wanted to say five minutes ago. I wanted to tell you, it’s nothing personal, but I can’t stand you looking at me, and all of a sudden it… oh, I know you’re just doing what’s expected of you; it’s what you have to do, but this convention that makes you… makes us… me… that’s what I mean. I’ll go on of course, no need to panic… I can do it… but I just felt I had to share this with you, make things clear. Right, yes, I’ll go on now. Um, I mean I’ll start.
    My brother died when I was still a child, and ever since I’ve been fascinated with angels. I was sure he had become an angel himself, and that reassured me. That was when I decided to collect them… angels. I acquired dozens of awful dust-gatherers: cherubim, archangels and seraphim at first. Then as I developed a more refined taste, I lost interest in them. Instead, I became interested in the portrayal of angels in paintings.
    MARIE 1
    â€¦while studying art history, research led to the discovery of Giotto. It became apparent that angels were practically flying trunks with no feet under them, sometimes cut off at the knees, or at least hidden by their long, flowing robes that were tattered at the bottom, almost as if someone had chewed them off or set fire to them. Thus we wondered what had deprived them of their feet, and most of all, who had veiled them, torn them off, burned or devoured them.

THE DYING SWAN
    A deceased