Private Passions

Martin Gayford has a passion for painting and music, and has spent his career writing about artists - Constable, Van Gogh, David Hockney, Lucian Freud - and thinking about the connection between art and music. His new biography of Michelangelo is published in this month, and in this edition of Private Passions he explores the musical worlds of some of our greatest painters. He begins with the choir that Michelangelo heard as he lay high up on the scaffolding, painting the Sistine Ceiling - there were complaints he banged around too much, interfering with the music.Martin Gayford then moves on to talk about the painter Constable as a musician (he was a flautist) and to tell the story of Van Gogh's attempt to learn the piano - in order to experience synaesthesia, and paint the music he played in bright colours.Apart from his biographies of great artists, Martin Gayford is famous because his portrait was painted by Lucian Freud ('Man in a Blue Scarf'), a process that took 18 months. During that time they visited