Love, from the sublime to the cruel and the sordid

It looks like a crime scene, but it's actually the portrait of a lover whose skin I wouldn't have liked to be in. The head is a target, and the torso is a paint-splattered shirt pinned to a blackboard. Niki de Saint Phalle imagined it this way at a time when, angry with her then-boyfriend, she was consuming what remained of that relationship by throwing darts at him, seeking solace in an unhappy gesture of revenge and destruction. The world is awash with art about love, and, as in real life, it encompasses a wide range of associated emotions, from the sublime and spiritual to the cruel and sordid.

“Sometimes we forget that all portraits include two people. The model is never alone. In reality, those eyes we now think are looking at us were once focused on the painter standing at the easel. When it turns out that the model and the artist were also in love with each other, everything suddenly becomes complicated,” writes Nick Trend in Love Through Art (Cinco Tintas), a volume in which the British historian attempts to uncover in the smallest details the true nature of the relationships maintained by artists of all times, not so much through the gossip that adorns their biographies, but rather through the connection, the intensity, the lust, the anxiety, the disappointment, or the ambivalence with which they painted their lovers.

“When it turns out that the model and the artist were also in love with each other, everything suddenly gets complicated,” writes Nick Trend.

Sylvia Sleigh portrayed her husband, the writer Lawrence Alloway, lying on a rug inside a Turkish bath alongside five other naked men. There is desire, but unlike the Ingres painting it replicates, it is not a man's voyeuristic fantasy, but rather a declaration of love in which the sexual spark leaps. Sometimes this spark pierces the painting and takes the form of a flirtatious and seductive smile, like the one Margriet gave her husband, the painter Jan Steen, in the 17th century, as she was preparing to eat an oyster.

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In others, Trend asks us to look beneath the paint to discover, for example, that the first time Rembrandt looked into his own eyes ten years after his last self-portrait, the sparkle in his eyes betrayed that he had found a purpose in life after the death of his first wife, Saskia. His face is aged, but the painter has fallen in love again with the woman who will be his last love, Hendrickje Stoffels, his housekeeper and mother of his daughter Cornelia, 22 years his junior, for whom he was officially reproved by the Church. There is no love without emotional complications, and many of the stories are steeped in sadness and cruelty, but nothing compares to the entanglements of Dora Carrington. She fell in love with a gay man and a lesbian woman who rejected her. She married a man she didn't love and ended up having an affair with his best friend. She painted portraits of all of them... before shooting herself with a borrowed shotgun.