Do the biographies of artists – where they came from, who they loved, what they looked like – matter? Or is our obsession with putting a face, a name and a personal story to a great work of art just a distraction from truly engaging with it? Can artistic biography ever be more than cheap gossip?
Philip Roth probably speaks for many writers when he scorns the biographers who search for keys to the work in the creator's life – a standpoint scathingly conveyed in his 2007 novel Exit Ghost. The artists Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly presumably agree with him as both have sought to keep their personal lives remote. For any serious creative artist it must be galling to think that works produced in the calm of the study or studio will be picked apart for personal meanings.
And yet there is no stopping the telling of stories about great art. Oxford historians working on 16th-century coroners' records have just recently added to the sparse and treasured stock of anecdotes about the life of William Shakespeare. The death by drowning of a child whose surname is a variant spelling of Shakespeare – names were spelt in all sorts of ways back then – may be the inspiration for Ophelia's death in Hamlet: a family story, perhaps, resurfacing in his work.
Only a few such tantalising personal details of Shakespeare's life exist, yet this does not stop literary critics trying to reconstruct a life from which to make sense of the works. Nor should it. The fact is that art is a communication between human beings, and to imagine the author as someone who once lived a flesh-and-blood existence may be fundamental to any serious reading of it. The alternative view, that art exists in Byzantine perfection beyond anecdote, smacks of sterile pretension. This is why people started telling tales about Shakespeare centuries ago, and still do.
While Shakespeare is a spectre somewhere within his dramas, other great creators make the connection of art and life explicit. The Italian medieval poets Dante and Petrarch led the way in putting their lives into their art. Both write of their deep love for a named woman – Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura – in a way that was to shape new ideas of the artist as an individual with particular affinities, desires and pain that must be told. Michelangelo transfers this personal voice to visual art, and his voice is more idiosyncratic than those of his medieval literary predecessors. It was not until the Romantic age that Michelangelo's precocious individuality was taken up as a norm and ideal right across the arts.
Was Romanticism a decline in art? Does it infect us to this day with a vulgar need to know the singer as well as the song? To think so is a basic misunderstanding of the place of art in life. Only if we want art to be a kind of courtly decor can we yearn for a return to the pre-Romantic era when artists hid in the background and the consumers of their works took centre stage. The Romantic belief in the expressive nature of all art is the only attitude that truly values creative genius. To search out anecdotes about Shakespeare is not to trivialise him, but to revere him properly.