The Eyes of Hollow Men

The crowd cheered as the great painter Aurelio announced his new work to the public. On the benches below, Francesco and Aurelio’s other apprentices watched bitterly. In truth, Aurelio was not the hand behind his paintings; it was the apprentices who ground the pigments, stretched the canvases, and laid down the paint. The master arrived only at the end, signing the works with a flourish to claim them as his own. Aurelio never bothered sharing his wealth or fame. His apprentices, bound by contracts of service, were not worthy.

After Aurelio’s speech, he gathered his apprentices to assign tasks for the new piece. To Francesco fell the task of painting angels located at the top of the canvas. 

The next day, Francesco, along with his brother, Pietro, was tasked by Aurelio to record and copy the angels in some frescoes in the ancient catacombs for the new piece. 

…

Francesco and Pietro traversed the cave under flickering torchlight, cold mist clinging to their clothes. Skulls stared silently, their empty sockets gaping.

Suddenly, they turned a corner and arrived at a cavernous room, lined with crypts on either side etched with gold, frescos, and inscriptions. Surprised, Francesco and Pietro examined the crumbling frescoes. Time had gnawed at the once brilliant pigments, leaving behind ghosts of color. Francesco’s eyes caught glimpses of angels. To his trained hand, their forms were crude and malformed. But the eyes held Francesco—eyes neither alive nor dead; not vivid enough to interact with, nor lifeless enough to ignore. 

Trapped in time, they watched him.

“Do you ever envy them?” Pietro asked, “The angels, carrying out the will of God?”

“Perhaps they are not as free and happy as we think,” Francesco said, staring at the angels’ eyes.”

“Are any of us ever free, even after death?”

Francesco sketched the angels, their broken outlines, their contorted limbs, and their fractured wings. But the eyes eluded him. No matter how many times he tried, no matter how precisely he measured, he could capture them.

They refused to be copied.

Exasperated, Francesco turned instead to an open tomb and the bones remaining inside. The skeleton had once been a man wealthy enough to afford a separate burial chamber in the catacombs, but now, he was just bones, all the flesh melted away, the soul gone. That was it! The soul! Francesco hurried back to staring again at the angels’ eyes. Though they had flesh, they had no soul—no light shining back, nothing lively. It was as if they had lost all hope, existing forever in this dark and moist…hell. 

The next day, Francesco got up early and went to the workshop to paint. He was absorbed in his work when the news arrived. Pietro had died of the sweating sickness. The apprentices went to see his body pale and waxy from beads of dried sweat, his glassy eyes staring up into emptiness.

Francesco surged forward, but the others held him back.

“Don’t,” one warned. “You might catch it too.”

Francesco struggled, his gaze locked on Pietro’s desolate stare. It pulled at something deep inside him—at that same feeling he had in the catacombs, seeing those angels watching the dead for eternity. 

He turned and ran—through the streets and alleys, the carts and prayer bells—into the workshop. He grabbed his brushes and canvases, and fled north, toward the catacombs. The earth opened to receive him; the tunnels closed around him; the skulls watched him pass; and the bones welcomed him. 

He found the frescoes and the angels. Still and broken. Without hesitation, Francesco dropped to his knees and began to paint. 

He repainted the broken angels, fixing and reforming their crude bodies and wings. But he could not fix the angels’ eyes, in which Francesco noticed a hollowness of people starving in the streets and rotting among the flies. And behind those eyes were not the decayed souls of immortal angels, but the deathly gaze of men who believed that God had forsaken them. 

Francesco continued painting, now reforming the angels’ eyes, replacing those deathly gazes with that of divine, radiant angels. As he painted, a ray of light shone through a small crack in the wall. He painted Pietro, now immortalized in heaven, exalted just as the angels, and Aurelio, condemned in hell forever. The ray of light grew brighter, and slowly his vision trembled and his eyes closed.

————

Francesco awoke to voices. 

A few moments later, Aurelio arrived with the priests and the guards. 

“Blasphemy! Desecration!” Aurelio shouted, “Take him away! Show him no mercy!” He could not let Francesco ruin his fame. 

Francesco did not resist and was dragged from the crypts. 

At sunrise, Francesco was bound to the stake. The crowd jeered and pointed; Aurelio watched in condemning silence. 

The fire rose.

“God has never forsaken us; rather, it is we who have forsaken God.”

No one heard Francesco’s last words. The frescos he painted remained hidden in the catacombs, still radiant long after he was ash.