Why art and opera make such passionate bedfellows

Art and opera have gone together ever since the first operatic spectacles were staged in Renaissance Italy. Opera is by definition a multimedia entertainment that brings together the visual with music. But in the heightened romantic world of operatic storytelling, artists are also liable to turn up as characters.

After all, their lives are so intense, so risky, so egotistical ... so operatic.

Puccini's operas are particularly obsessed with the desperate lives of artists. La Bohème features a stony-broke painter called Marcello among its suffering dreamers. In Tosca, the heroine's lover is a painter named Mario Cavaradossi. At the start of the opera she is suspicious because he has used another woman as the model for his latest painting.

Puccini's artists are fictional. Yet real-life artists are also subjects for this grandest of arts. What does it take for an artist to make it into grand opera? A couple of current and imminent productions offer clues.

Goya is surely ripe for opera. He lived in the real world of the Napoleonic era that Puccini fictionalises in Tosca, witnessed the horrors of war and retreated into the dark fantasies of his etchings and Black Paintings. He is a powerful candidate for music that plumbs his depths. Yet Michael Nyman's opera Facing Goya, which has just been revived at the Spoleto Festival USA (it was composed in 2000), ignores all that. It's about someone looking through the modern world for Goya's severed skull. Ultimately the great artist is cloned amid debates about medical ethics. Well, that's modern opera for you. Will Facing Goya prove as enduringly popular as La Bohème? The New York Times review calls it "claptrap."

For a truly romantic telling of an artist's life in grand opera look no further than Benvenuto Cellini by Hector Berlioz, which is about to open at English National Opera in a production directed by Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. If ever an opera demanded the kind of visual exravagance Gilliam is famous for, this is it. A major part of Benvenuto Cellini dramatises the casting of Cellini's bronze statue Perseus. Expect fire, brimstone and molten metal.

Cellini's actual life has a whiff of hellfire as well as the fire of the studio furnace. In his Autobiography, rediscovered in the Romantic era (Berlioz composed his opera with its blasts of frenzied sound to suggest the energy of art in 1830s Paris at the height of Romanticism) this Renaissance artist tells how he murdered rivals in a life of riotous adventure.

Yet even this factual basis isn't enough for opera. To fit his hero into a less satanic frame, Berlioz gives him a girlfriend and goes easy on the killings. This opera is really about art itself, the fire of creativity that pours out of Cellini's furnace in the mad struggle to cast a statue.

Opera romanticises art, but in doing so it says something about the pain and anguish of creativity that perhaps can only be conveyed with heart-filled singing, an orchestra charged with passion, and a set that takes your breath away. All art is operatic.