Pilate's Admonition, seen by strangers

Mikhaylov reads his visitors at a glance: Golenishchev's face he has already filed with the falsely important ones, and the other two are wealthy Russians who will see the German quack and the stupid English pre-Raphaelite and then pronounce that art has deteriorated. He uncovers Pilate's Admonition and, for the length of their silence, sees it with a stranger's indifferent eye: three years of searching faces and shades of tone become trivialities a thousand times repeated, and the Christ that once enraptured him a poor repetition of Titian's and Raphael's. Then Golenishchev praises the figure of Pilate, the kind first-rate fellow who is an official to the backbone, and the picture comes alive again in an instant. Anna says Christ is sorry for Pilate, which pleases him just as much. Vronsky admires the technique, which grates painfully — technique does not exist, only the care not to damage the idea while removing the wrappings. Golenishchev objects that he has made a man-God, and Mikhaylov can find nothing to say.

Tolstoy's fullest statement of his own aesthetic is given to a painter who cannot defend it aloud: there is no technique, only the removal of what obscures the idea, and a cook could do it if the thing were revealed to her. The chapter's cruelty is the minute of silence in which a man sees three years of work through the eyes of people he despises and agrees with them.