VITA BREVIS, ARS LONGA

Life is short, but Art is long.
by KaleidescopeCat
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No profit is made from this story. All characters associated with Harry Potter belong to J.K. Rowling.
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Vincent Pell woke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, confused and quite unsure what exactly had shaken him out of his dreams. For a very long moment he lay perfectly still, listening to the creaks and drips of the house around him. He heard nothing particularly unusual, and was about to drift back to sleep when from downstairs a soft scraping noise jerked him back into wakefulness.

He scrabbled around the bed for his spectacles, finding them at last on the floor next to a pamphlet from the Ministry of Magic that he hadn't bothered to read and a stack of sketches that were now covered in cat footprints. "Blasted feline," he muttered under his breath, and froze as a soft thump echoed through the bedroom.

Someone was coming up the stairs. Vincent scrambled out from under the blankets and went for his wand, tossed carelessly atop the chest of drawers across the room. His fingertips had just closed around the smooth wood when the door burst open with a crash.

He felt his heart leap into his mouth. It had to be a mistake-he hadn't done anything at all-yet there they were, hooded and masked, standing amidst the rubble of his bedroom door with wands outstretched. His own wand dropped from his fingers and clattered on the floor.

"Vincent Pell," said one of the Death Eaters. It was not a question. "You are the finest painter in the wizarding world."

"I-I have had some success, I suppose," stammered Vincent. He could not remember going from standing to kneeling; yet here he was, the cold wood of his bedroom floor hard against his knees.

"Perfect," said the Death Eater, and raised his wand. Vincent's eyes widened in terror-this was the end-but no, the Death Eater cried, "Stupefy!" before the world went black.

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"Wake up."

The sibilant voice slithered its way into his dreams, tugging at his consciousness until Vincent could resist it no longer. His head ached; a vague memory of terror swam about in his brain, lurking just beyond rational thought.

A sudden sharp pain in his side brought him back to full awareness. Blinking as dark shapes hovered just out of his view, Vincent wondered where his spectacles had gone. As he sat up, slowly, someone shoved them crookedly onto his nose and the world came back into focus. He rather wished it hadn't, as the first thing he saw was the Death Eater who had jinxed him sitting in an armchair a little ways away. He met the eyes of the Death Eater, staring out from beyond the skeletal mask-his gaze traveled upwards-and for the second time that night Vincent found himself paralyzed by fear, trembling from head to foot.

White-faced and hairless, with burning red eyes and slits like a snake for a nose, Lord Voldemort stood up from his own armchair next to the fire, idly stroking the giant snake wrapped around his shoulders. With a strange hissing noise-He speaks Parseltongue,doesn't he? thought Vincent fearfully-the Dark Lord let the snake slither down his arm and onto the floor, where it slid swiftly out of sight.

"A pleasure, my good fellow," said the Dark Lord silkily. He extended a hand to the panic-stricken Vincent, who took it without quite being able to hide his shudder. But He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, if he noticed, said nothing, and pulled the trembling painter to his feet. "I have seen your work displayed in many fine wizarding homes, Mr. Pell. Most lifelike. Your spellwork is impeccable."

"T-thank you," murmured Vincent, his heart hammering inside his chest. Straightening his glasses, he looked around the room. Dark except for the light from the fire, he could nonetheless see several large paintings hanging from the walls; Lord Voldemort, a collector of fine art? The thought rather gave him pause. He would not have expected a killer many times over to have a liking for artwork.

"I have always appreciated the complexities of painting," said the Dark Lord, as if he had known the thoughts in Vincent's mind just then. Shivering slightly, Vincent thought that he probably had-who knew what Voldemort was capable of, anyway? He resolved to think no more uncomplimentary thoughts about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, and then immediately recalled at least six gruesome murders and misdeeds from the Daily Prophet.

Whether he could hear Vincent's tumultuous thoughts or not, Lord Voldemort gave no sign. "The peculiarities of the subjects in paintings intrigue me a great deal," he said conversationally, speaking as though to a casual friend, "especially magical portraiture. I am always curious regarding the process of presenting a worthy record of one's subject. One can have it magically done, automatically leaving an imprint of oneself in a portrait upon one's death. Or, alternately, have a likeness painted in the Muggle way and enchanted afterwards, before the subject's death."

"Yes," said Vincent cautiously, when the Dark Lord paused, "but when done that way, often the remnant is little more than a kind of memory." His fear, while not shrinking, had ceased at least to grow any more. Absurdly, he hoped he would not face his death in his nightshirt and dressing gown.

"Indeed," said Voldemort. "Hardly fully realized. Able to speak, perhaps, able to interact, but in no ways a substitute for the living person." He turned on his heel and stared into the crackling fire, the flickering light throwing his features into weird contrasts of palest ivory and reflected crimson. "Yet, Mr. Pell, your paintings speak and move and attend to the world about them with a complexity unmatched by any other artist or magical process. So very delicately do you capture the... how shall we put it... soul... of the person in your portraits that they almost seem to be alive. More so than even the enchanted paintings in the Minister of Magic's office or the Headmaster's office at Hogwarts."

"Well, those sites are rather unique," said Vincent, pushing his glasses higher on his nose. Quite apart from being afraid, he was becoming rather curious as to why he had been brought here. Surely it could not simply be that the Dark Lord wished to discuss art? Granted, such a conversation was probably beyond most of the Death Eaters.

"Of course. The imprint of the Ministers and Headmasters on places where they spent a great deal of time allows the painting more depth," replied Voldemort. "But tell me, Mr. Pell, why are your paintings different? Why do they possess such strong traces of their subjects, when others are little more than a memory?"

Vincent stared at the Dark Lord. There was a strange, almost hungry look in Voldemort's eye. He did not like this talk of memories and traces; the note of longing in the Dark Lord's hissing voice.

"Your paintings are as like to the subject as to be the subject," said Voldemort, whirling on the frightened artist. One slender, white hand gripped Vincent's shoulder, the other gestured gracefully to the paintings on the walls. "One may live on in art, as the old proverb says it. Life is short, but art is long. One may be remembered, through the talent of a skilled artist."

With a furious glare the Dark Lord released Vincent, who sank to his knees, shivering. For a long moment he was silent, turned away; then, with a charming smile lighting up his snakelike face, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named turned back to the painter cowering in terror on the floor.

"I wish to be remembered, Mr. Pell," said the Dark Lord. "I wish to have my portrait painted."

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The weeks that followed were, Vincent had no doubt, some of the oddest in his entire life, possibly only topped by a disastrous attempt by his old teacher to create a moving statue of Rowena Ravenclaw riding an eagle (the results of which, it was decided, were that statues should remain firmly fixed in place after the whole affair flapped off never to be found). Kept deep within the confines of the Dark Lord's hideout, Vincent had tried at once upon being left alone to Apparate away and found that no matter how hard he concentrated he remained firmly where he was. The Death Eaters had packed up his entire studio, complete with drapery and staging effects for backgrounds, and brought it here-wherever here was. They had provided him a couple of silent, sullen house elves, who set the entire affair up at his direction just as it had been in his own little bungalow outside London. Adjoining the studio was a little bedroom and bathroom, with a table for eating (the house elves brought meals three times a day) and a shelf full of books on famous wizarding artists for when he was not working on the portrait.

It was on the whole a comfortable affair for a prison. Vincent might even have enjoyed it a bit if he had not been fully aware that he would be cursed to death the moment he stepped outside the door (if in fact he was able to open it; he hadn't yet dared try).

Enjoyment, however, was hard to come by when each day the Dark Lord descended upon his little prison to sit without moving a muscle as Vincent marshaled his shaking fingers into working order. Never had he seen anyone pose so for a portrait, able to remember a posture with ease and remain there, still as stone, for hours on end.

And never had Vincent been so utterly repulsed and yet fascinated by a subject, never had anyone presented such a palette of evil yet been so completely convinced of his own rightness. If anything could be said of the Dark Lord with certainty, it was that he had unshakeable confidence in his own abilities and an absolute belief that his quest for power was the only right thing to do.

"For the portrait to have proper vitality," said Vincent at the very beginning, readying the blank canvas to receive its first tentative sketch marks, "you must let your thoughts be open, letting the mind flow out onto the canvas. The spells I use are linked to Legilimency, but instead of flowing from your mind to my own the memories are entwined in the paint. It leaves a sort of copy of the wizard when the work is finished."

"Most interesting," the Dark Lord replied. "I have experimented with similar magic myself, though the methods were rather more drastic. How do we proceed?"

Vincent swallowed, his mouth dry. Usually, he simply talked with the subject, asking them questions of this or that, letting their minds flow. But he could not bring himself to do the same with this particular subject. How did one ask Lord Voldemort about his family or friends, his likes and dislikes?

"I can control what goes into the painting," he said hesitantly, "and so can you, by speaking of things you want your portrait to contain. Many wizards find it helpful to begin with childhood and move forward, describing recollections of youth and moments of particular happiness or importance." Or dastardly deeds, in your case, Vincent added silently.

"A more involved process than I had thought," said Voldemort. "And yet, I see how the magic must work. A record... A form of immortality. And I must divulge what few other souls know to do it properly." His snakelike eyes flashed red, and he laughed. "Very well, painter. Let us begin.

"I was born in the snows of winter to a frail mother who lived only long enough to name me Tom for my father and Marvolo for my grandfather..."

It was at that moment Vincent knew he would never leave these little rooms alive.


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For days and days (after only a few he lost count) he painted, stroke by stroke granting the Dark Lord a kind of immortality, hearing the tales of dark, nefarious deeds from the mouth of the perpetrator himself. He listened as Voldemort spoke of his youth, frustrated in his ordinariness and trapped in a Muggle orphanage until one day a wizard named Albus Dumbledore came to tell him of his grander destiny.

"Always, I knew there was something," said the Dark Lord on that day, "something that set me apart from the base Muggle scum I endured in that place."

With shock Vincent listened to the tale of the opening of the legendary Chamber of Secrets, a mystery yet unsolved during his time at Hogwarts twenty years later, and shuddered as the Dark Lord recounted his own early experimentation with immortality. The drastic methods he had spoken of at their first sitting-of tearing apart his own soul to leave a record in a diary-left Vincent pale with shock long into the night after the Dark Lord finished the day's pose.

Borgin and Burkes, the infamous collectors of Knockturn Alley, surely had little idea what they were getting themselves into when they hired young Tom Riddle as a solicitor and man-of-all-work. Only the least valuable acquisitions made their way into the hands of his employers; the rest, Tom squirreled away to aid with later ambitions. And when he left the shop behind, traveling across Europe to learn of the dangerous Dark Arts employed by Grindelwald and his few remaining followers, Vincent shuddered to hear of his quest for the remnants of the Hogwarts founders.

"I have gone farther along the path to immortality than any other," he said, with a gleam in his eyes that chilled the painter to the very depths of his soul. "Imagine my surprise when I found that I had delved more deeply into the so-called Dark Arts than any other living wizard, perhaps more deeply than any wizard ever save Salazar Slytherin himself. Even Grindelwald did not know as much as I. In the end, he was a petty fool, unable to do what must be done to achieve his goals."

Vincent listened and set into the paint the darkness of the first rise of the Death Eaters, linking the memories of murder after murder to the shadows and highlights of the Dark Lord's lean, terrible face. He heard the triumphs and disappointments of the years of terror (terror if you weren't a Death Eater, anyway, golden age if you were), all relayed in a peculiarly conversational tone that only rarely betrayed any hint of emotion.

When the Dark Lord reached the night of his fall, Vincent found himself gripped with a strange excitement. How many people had wondered what exactly happened that night? How the Boy-Who-Lived had survived? He struggled to hide his curiosity, hanging on his subject's every word.

Yet on this subject, the Dark Lord said little. With but a trace of bitterness in his voice, Voldemort only stated, as if relating the most commonplace of events, "That night, in the Potter house, I murdered first James and then Lily. When I attempted to kill the brat, the curse rebounded and sent me from my body, the merest shell of life, but still alive."

A day spent in describing the flight from England, hiding in the bodies of rats and mice on ships passing over the Channel to France, slithering eastward to Albania as a snake, hoping to find some remnant of the old Dark wizards there. But they had all fled upon his downfall, and the diminished Lord Voldemort was forced to spend more than a decade in exile, wandering from Germany to Russia to the Balkans and back again until a hapless young wizard discovered him the summer before he was due to begin teaching at Hogwarts-the same summer the Philosopher's Stone was taken out of Gringotts and sent to the school. A perfect opportunity, or so it seemed.

"And who should again stand in my way but Harry Potter," said the Dark Lord, his voice emotionless. Yet a spark of red burned deep in his eyes, and Vincent shuddered. He dabbed a bit of the color onto the canvas, and the painting seemed nearly as threatening as the actual Voldemort, even in its unfinished state. He was very glad, all of a sudden, that he was not Harry Potter, no matter how thrilling it might be to be the Boy Who Lived. Voldemort would certainly never rest until the poor boy was dead.

But in the end, Vincent would share the same fate-he could hardly delay finishing any longer when the Dark Lord reached the tale of the attack on the Ministry of Magic, only a few months before Vincent's capture. Of course he could fiddle and fuss with this and that, pretending that it was not so close to being finished, but he would only be overdoing things. He might delay his death-and in doing so, he thought bitterly, he would ruin the painting, ensuring that whatever fate he suffered would be ten times worse.

Without a doubt, this portrait was his finest work.

He knew he should destroy it, knew he should refuse to finish, but he could not. A Muggle painter would look at it and proclaim it the equal of a Botticelli or a David in handling and emotion; a wizard could speak with it and learn more of Lord Voldemort than any other source, with depth and precision unequalled in any other source. Vincent was not one to praise himself unduly, but his estimation of his own work was truthful when deserved.

When the Dark Lord finished speaking and stood up for the day, having finished the tale of one Draco Malfoy's bungled attempts to provide an entrance into Hogwarts, Vincent nodded goodbye to him and swept a few more delicate strokes onto the canvas. As the door closed, he set the brush down and stood back.

Very few people could call the Dark Lord handsome, as they would have described him in his days as Tom Riddle-but attractiveness was not a necessary ingredient for a compelling portrait. Nearly a meter high, the portrait showed Voldemort sitting in an ornate throne, the carved wooden arms and legs of the chair entwined with serpents. A deep emerald curtain fell in stately folds behind him, contrasting elegantly with the stark whiteness of the Dark Lord's face.

It was done.

Vincent knew it; Voldemort would know it too, when he arrived tomorrow. The painting brimmed with magic, waiting only for him to perform the last charm that would allow it to be fully brought to life.

And then he would die, snuffed out in a flash of green light like so many others before him. Used for his purpose and then killed for no other reason except that he knew too much; he had given the Dark Lord immortality, of a sort, and his own life would end far too soon.

Unless...he had given Voldemort immortality... why not...

Vincent's eyes widened. Setting aside the portrait of Lord Voldemort, he picked up his brush and began to paint once more, quickly and precisely, as though his life depended on it.

And in a way, perhaps it did.

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When the Dark Lord strode into the studio the next morning, he found a painting of himself bowing regally at him, red eyes flashing with hints of cunning. The likeness was perfect. He nodded at his painted counterpart, delighted by the results. Though the painting was little more than a fallback in case his Horcruxes-unimaginably-failed to protect him from the ravages of mortality, he nevertheless felt it was right that he should be a subject of this magnificent work of art, remembered to all future generations.

On the bed in the next room, he found the painter dead, a brush cradled in one hand and a wand in the other. The silly fool had cursed himself. Ah well, the painter's actions had saved someone else the trouble of doing it for him. A pity the Death Eaters couldn't have used him for sport, though. Once more Voldemort studied his portrait, pleased with the results. When he achieved his dominion over the wizarding world it would hang in a place of honor. For now, he left it in the studio with the body of Vincent Pell lying prostrate in the next room.

Though neither Voldemort nor Vincent knew it, the late Albus Dumbledore had once pointed out to the Boy Who Lived that the Dark Lord had a failing-a tendency to overlook small details-details, for instance, like the addition of a small mirror in the background of the painting. Round, with a gold frame, the mirror reflected in its shining surface an easel with a bespectacled wizard perched behind it, brush in hand.

Vincent Pell had painted himself into the picture.

Just as He Must Not Be Named had wished, the work would live on for eternity-and the artist would live with it. Someday, when the Dark Lord was defeated and the painting was all that remained, Vincent Pell himself would tell the story of his capture and the greatest and most terrible work of art he had ever completed, his and the Dark Lord's legacy to the world.

After all, who was Lord Voldemort to begrudge Vincent Pell his own little bit of immortality?

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Examples of self-referential art can be found throughout history. One of the most famous is the Arnolfini portrait by Jan Van Eyck, in which you can see the artist reflected in a mirror behind the man and woman in the foreground. In the end, this method of leaving a legacy is just as effective as any spell.