As he went into the studio, the artist Mikhailov looked his visitors over once again and also noted in his imagination the expression of Vronsky’s face, especially his cheekbones. Though his artistic sense worked incessantly, collecting material, though he felt an ever increasing excitement because the moment for judgements of his work was approaching, he quickly and subtly formed an idea of these three people out of imperceptible tokens. This one (Golenishchev) was a local Russian. Mikhailov did not remember his last name or where he had met him and what they had talked about. He remembered only his face, as he did all the faces he had ever seen, but he also remembered that his was one of the faces laid away in his imagination in the huge department of the falsely important and poor in expression. A mass of hair and a very open forehead lent a superficial importance to the face, on which there was merely a small, childish, anxious expression, focused above the narrow bridge of the nose. Vronsky and Mme Karenina, in Mikhailov’s conjecture, must have been noble and wealthy Russians who, like all wealthy Russians, understood nothing about art, but pretended to be amateurs and connoisseurs. ‘They’ve probably already looked at all the old stuff, and now they’re going around to the studios of the new ones - some German charlatan, some fool of a Pre-Raphaelite Englishman25 — and have come to me only to complete the survey,’ he thought. He knew very well the dilettantes’ manner (which was worse the more intelligent they were) of going to look at the studios of contemporary artists with the sole aim of having the right to say that art has declined and that the more one looks at the new painters, the more one sees how inimitable the great old masters still are. He expected all that, he saw it in their faces, saw it in the indifferent nonchalance with which they talked among themselves, looked at the manikins and busts and strolled about freely, waiting for him to uncover the painting. But despite that, all the while he was turning over his sketches, raising the blinds and removing the sheet, he felt a strong excitement, the more so because, though to his mind all noble and wealthy Russians had to be brutes and fools, he liked Vronsky and especially Anna.
‘Here, if you please?’ he said, stepping aside with his fidgety gait and pointing to the picture. ‘It’s the admonition of Pilate. Matthew, chapter twenty-seven,’ he said, feeling his lips beginning to tremble with excitement. He stepped back and stood behind them.
For a few seconds, as the visitors silently looked at the picture, Mikhailov also looked at it, and looked with an indifferent, estranged eye. For those few seconds he believed in advance that the highest, the fairest judgement would be pronounced by them, precisely by these visitors whom he had so despised a moment ago. He forgot everything he had thought before about his picture during the three years he had been painting it; he forgot all its virtues, which for him were unquestionable - he saw it with their indifferent, estranged, new eyes and found nothing good in it. He saw in the foreground the vexed face of Pilate and the calm face of Christ, and in the background the figures of Pilate’s servants and the face of John, peering at all that was going on. Each face, grown in him with its own particular character after so much searching, after so many errors and corrections, each face that had brought him so much pain and joy, and all of them rearranged so many times to preserve the whole, the nuances of colour and tone achieved with such difficulty — all this together, seen through their eyes, now seemed to him a banality repeated a thousand times. The dearest face of all, the face of Christ, the focus of the picture, which had delighted him so when he discovered it, was quite lost for him when he looked at the picture through their eyes. He saw a well-painted (or even not so well-painted - he now saw clearly a heap of defects) repetition of the endless Christs of Titian, Raphael, Rubens, with the same soldiers and Pilate. All this was banal, poor, old, and even badly painted - gaudy and weak. They would be right to speak falsely polite phrases in the artist’s presence, and to pity him and laugh at him when they were alone.
This silence became too painful for him (though it lasted no more than a minute). To break it and show that he was not excited, he took himself in hand and addressed Golenishchev.
‘I believe I had the pleasure of meeting you,’ he said to him, anxiously turning to look now at Anna, now at Vronsky, so as not to miss a single detail in the expressions on their faces.
‘Why, yes! We met at Rossi’s, remember, the evening of the recital by that young Italian lady, the new Rachel,’26 Golenishchev replied freely, taking his eyes from the picture without the least regret and turning to the artist.
Noticing, however, that Mikhailov was waiting for an opinion on the picture, he said:
