★ Written by an art historian, this book uncovers artists’ secrets based on professional expertise, balancing authenticity and readability.

★ Features 35 mind-blowing stories that reveal the little-known side of art masters, highly topical and engaging.

★ Looks beyond the paintings themselves, focusing on artists’ real lives and the background of masterpieces, offering a unique and fresh perspective.

We keep wandering through museum halls, admiring exquisite paintings and staring at each canvas for a long time. Those magnificent portraits, still lifes, and landscapes seem so charming to us, so the images of famous painters have become impeccable in our minds—they are models of purity and beauty. After all, we are used to learning about these famous painters through short descriptions next to their works and brief biographies easily found in libraries and online. This makes their images almost ethereal, as if there was nothing but creation in their lives, and as if their paintings became sacred classics as soon as they were born. But painters were flesh-and-blood people. Their creations sometimes caused confusion, and their actions drew condemnation. In fact, the vast majority of famous painters had at least complex personalities or consensual relationships disapproved by society. And the background stories of certain masterpieces are sometimes shocking. How to explain this phenomenon—geniuses’ rich imagination drives progress on the one hand, but pushes them to completely crazy acts on the other.

So, can genius and misconduct coexist?
In this book, we will show you the unexpected, little-known side of painters, and you will find the answer to this question yourself.

The book contains 35 interesting and sometimes shocking stories, including:

The love entanglement between a monk-painter and his model from the monastery

The misandrist female painter

The love triangle of Bernard John and Morris

Why a bunch of asparagus appeared next to beautiful flowers in Édouard

Manet’s still life

Michelangelo’s only love

Ruskin’s “celibate marriage”

The Italian woman who conquered Bryullov, Ivanov, Gogol, and Turgenev

The amorous Picasso and his seven unfortunate muses

Raphael’s secret marriage

Camille Claudel’s “devoted yet tormented” love

How to become Gabriel Rossetti’s model and survive

Peter Paul Rubens—the portrait painter, spy, and diplomat with three identities

Alexandra Vasilievna Zhukova

Historian and art historian, graduated from the History Department of Saratov University. She currently works at the Radishchev Art Museum and teaches specialized courses on art history at the university.