Private View: The Secret Lives of the World's Great Artists

Private View is a witty, informed and highly entertaining excursion into the lives and times of the great artists. Gone is the old reverence, and here, in its place, are the real stories of the artists who have gone down in history – their women, their crimes, their illnesses, their perversions, their patrons.

Read how Rembrandt had his mistress committed to a ‘house of correction’; why Goya’s beheading scene was so horrible – because it was real and fascinated him; that Caravaggio’s painting of young boys in full-frontal poses was commissioned by members of the clergy for solitary titillation; how Botticelli persuaded his neighbours to be quiet – and much more.

Alexandra Connor, herself an accomplished artist and a fellow of the Royal Society of Art, has drawn the illustrations for this book and brings to sparkling life the world(s?) where art was part of everyone’s lives, where rivals murdered one another, shared lovers, stole from one another and generally fought to survive in the astonishing times in which they lived.