I love it always when real paintings appear in novels. Writers do not lightly contrive to weave formidable works of art into their plots, so when they feel compelled to do so it means their passion for the painting is sincerely overwhelming – often to the detriment of their fiction – because their prose heats up to a discordant pitch while the scene on the museum wall takes over. This is probably not good for the story's balance, but it makes a splendid sideshow for the reader. The example I stumbled upon today, quoted below, is from Iris Murdoch's 1974 novel, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine.
She had felt very strange that afternoon in the National Gallery. An intense physical feeling of anxiety had taken possession of her as she was looking at Giorgione's picture of Saint Anthony and Saint George. There was a tree in the middle background which she had never properly attended to before. Of course she had seen it, since she had often looked at the picture, but she had never before felt its significance, though what that significance was she could not say. There it was in the middle of clarity, in the middle of bright darkness, in the middle of limpid sultry yellow air, in the middle of nowhere at all with the distant clouds creeping by behind it, linking the two saints yet also separating them and also being itself and nothing to do with them at all, a ridiculously frail poetical vibrating motionless tree which was also a special particular tree on a special particular evening when the two saints happened (how odd) to be doing their respective things (ignoring each other) in a sort of murky yet brilliant glade (what on earth however was going on in the foreground?) beside a luscious glistening pool out of which two small and somehow domesticated demons were cautiously emerging for the benefit of Saint Anthony, while behind him Saint George, with a helmet like a pearl, was bullying an equally domesticated and inoffensive little dragon.
Hypnotized by the tree, Harriet found that she could not take herself away. She stood there for a long time staring at it, tried to move, took several paces looking back over her shoulder, then came back again, as if there were some vital message which the picture was trying and failing to give her. Perhaps it was just Giorgione's maddening genius for saying something absurdly precise and yet saying it so marvellously that the precision was all soaked away into a sort of cake of sheer beauty.