Tracing an enigmatic borderland between art and real life

Novelists do have their share of fun with artists and the art world. As art columnist writer Jonathan Jones explains in a recent essay, this actually goes back to the very origins of artistic celebrity! ‘Lives of the Artists’ by Giorgio Vasari, probably the first ever noteworthy work of art criticism & art history, was published in 1550. It was followed up by an expanded edition almost two decades later.

Often branded as nothing more than just a collection of a bunch of some sensational anecdotes about eccentric artists and their art, it, in fact, was nothing less than a collection of insightful stories about art. The author saw it as an adventure, art creators as anti-heroes or heroes - their travails concocting terrific tales.

Vasari, as mentioned above, created the fascinating modern image of the ‘artist’ by evoking tales, which hovered on the thin boundaries between fact and fiction. Another of his contemporaries Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor and criminal, traced his own life in a way that just as richly juxtaposed reality with fantasy.

Cellini's life was turned into an opera by Berlioz; Vasari's life of Michelangelo was spun into Irving Stone's bestseller The Agony and the Ecstasy, which was filmed with Charlton Heston. Since then we have had the life of Vermeer in Girl with a Pearl Earring and the commercial king of them all, The Da Vinci Code.

All these works of fictions exist in that enigmatic borderland between art and real life. If the latter is real and art to be seen as an illusion, does the artists’ lives glide between truth and illusion? Do they take on the apparent unreality of their own works? Or perhaps, as evident in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, it might well be a complex two-way relationship, and art does reveal truths that the apparent illusion of our everyday life habitually conceals.

Either way, the world of art is indeed strange and eccentric enough to inspire many such stories. It’s no surprise then that many distinguished writers have continued to recognize in the world of art and artists a tantalizing and tempting subject matter that swings between the plausible and the fabulous, between truth and deceit. The worlds of art and literature intermingle to result in highly engaging literary works.