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Artists inhabit the borders between fact and fiction – no wonder their works and lives have inspired writers from Vasari to Dan Brown I recently read Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time since I was a teenager. I understood what was going on a lot better than I did when I was 14 and had not heard of a gay subtext. But it also triggered me to think about why art inspires so many good stories. In Wilde’s scintillating novel, a painter creates a portrait of a young man he is in love with. All his unrequited, indeed unspoken, passion goes into the painting, which somehow makes it more than a passive work of art. It takes on magical, mysterious properties, and when young Dorian wishes for the portrait to age and decay while he is preserved in his pristine beauty, he gets his wish. This story belongs to a particular class of art fictions – tales about works of art. Other examples include The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac and The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe. If writers can tell such stories about works of art, imagine what they can do with the lives and milieux of artists. From Emile Zola’s The Masterpiece , a dark portrait of the French 19th-century avant-garde, to Michel Houellebecq’s La Carte et le Territoire , which satirises the contemporary art world, novelists have had their fun with artists. This goes back to the very origins of artistic celebrity. The first great work of art criticism and art history, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists , published in 1550 with an expanded second edition in 1568, is sometimes dismissed by pedants as nothing more than a collection of sensational anecdotes about artists and their works. In fact it is nothing less than a collection of great stories about art. Vasari saw art as an adventure, its creators as heroes or anti-heroes whose travails make terrific tales. Have you heard the one about Andrea del Castagno murdering Domenico Veneziano? He relates the story of these 15th-century artists who took their rivalry to the point of actual murder. It is not true: the supposed killer predeceased his victim. But Vasari’s compelling murder mystery says a lot about the obsessive rivalries of the Renaissance, so it remains artistically true. Dorian Gray would have understood. Vasari created the modern image of the artist by telling stories that hover on the borders between fact and fiction. His contemporary Benvenuto Cellini, sculptor and criminal, told his own life in a way that just as richly weaves reality with fantasy. It is no wonder that writers have continued to recognise in art and artists a tantalising subject matter that lingers between truth and lies, between the plausible and the fabulous. 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 fictions exist in the enigmatic borderland between art and life. If life is real and art is an illusion, does the life of an artist glide between illusion and truth? Do artists take on the unreality of their works? Or perhaps, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is a two-way relationship, and art reveals truths that the illusion of everyday life conceals. Either way, art is easily strange enough to inspire many more stories. Art Dan Brown Oscar Wilde Jonathan Jones guardian.co.uk