The Art of Fiction on Art, Part I

How can any visually responsive, historically curious, lover of paintings resist wanting to write a novel with an art element? For my part, I don't see how. The terrain is unlimited, the approaches varied.
For example, the imagined events of a painter's life; the researched history of a painter's career; the experience of a wife, muse, model, or mistress of a painter; the focus on the making of a single painting; an invented painting; a loose echo of a historic painter; a completely invented painter; a real painter but imagined characters surrounding him; the fate of a gallery or museum; a theft, a forgery, a romp, a journey through the provenance of a painting. In the list below, you'll find all of these.
To what do we owe the appeal for writers to build a narrative on art? That's probably different for each of the writers below, but I think the attraction must have its seed in a deep-seated love of art or of a single painting, a particular style, a painter's vibrant or struggling life, or of the time period that produced the painting. The urge is not new. In the sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari, Florentine painter and writer, was the first recorder of lives of great artists of the western hemisphere. He was accurate in most cases, inventive in others. But what did Vasari miss that transpired after his death?
What struggles there must have been to develop a new style, to display the way a painter sees, to reveal the interior of his mind, to express the soul of an epoch? What physical and mental exhaustion, what frustration at limited skills, what despair at creeping age, financial ruin, doubt, ridicule, scorn was there? What ecstasy bubbled up frothing and pure in finding the perfect model or a muse? What energy was required to fight against tradition-bound critics and the capricious power of their pens? How could one handle distractions of grief, love, addiction, spiritual seeking so as not to abort or damage one's work? And what about the story behind a painting so well known that its fame carries the novel?
And then there are the intriguing explorations of those personages related to a painter--a wife, lover, daughter, model. Paintings as commodities appeal to the mystery and thriller writer gleaning story from heists, forgeries, secrets, while invented painters allow the writer to explore regions of the human heart, the spiritual search, the development of identity.
In some of these, the art is a central feature of the narrative. In others, it's almost incidental, and teases us by its shy and limited appearance. Any of these elements can be seen as metaphors for life.

The Art of Fiction on Art, Part II will be a list of the above.