News of the painter Mikhaylov

The neglected palazzo — stucco ceilings, frescoes, yellow damask, sombre halls of pictures — keeps alive Vronsky's pleasant delusion that he is not an equerry without a post but an enlightened connoisseur and modest artist who has renounced the world for love. He paints studies under an Italian professor, reads up mediaeval Italy, and takes to wearing his hat and cloak in a mediaeval manner that suits him. A Russian paper brings news of Mikhaylov, an artist in the town whose Christ before Pilate has been bought unfinished; Golenishchev condemns the Ivanov-Strauss-Renan tendency and the gross error of choosing Christ at all. Vronsky, thinking of himself as a Russian Maecenas, proposes commissioning a portrait of Anna. She refuses — she wants no portrait after his — and suggests one of Annie, glancing at the beautiful Italian nurse in the garden, whose head Vronsky is painting and of whom Anna dares not admit she is jealous. Golenishchev lectures on born freethinkers until Anna cuts him off: let us go and see him.

Vronsky's mediaeval cloak is the chapter's judgement on his art: a costume for a role, chosen because it is becoming. Tolstoy lets Golenishchev talk at length about what painters must not do while the real painter is across town working. The nurse is named as Anna's one secret sorrow and handled exactly as she handles everything — by being extra kind to the woman.