What is Andrei Rublev’s “Trinity” famous for?

May 15 Russian Orthodox Church informedthat Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to return to her the icon “Trinity” by Andrei Rublev. Now the icon is stored in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. What the icon is known for – in the material “Kommersant”.

The Trinity icon was painted by Andrei Rublev at the request of the abbot of the Trinity Monastery (now the Trinity-Sergius Lavra). The exact dates of writing are unknown. According to a widespread version, it was created during the construction and painting of the iconostasis of the stone Trinity Cathedral in the 1420s. It is considered the only icon that has survived to this day, completely created by Andrei Rublev.

The icon depicts a story from the Old Testament (Genesis, chapter 18) about the appearance of God in the form of three wanderers: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Behind the Father is a house, behind the Son is a tree, behind the Holy Spirit is a mountain. On the table is a bowl with the head of a sacrificial calf. Christians consider this plot a prototype of the sacrament.

The size of the icon is 142 by 114 cm. It is painted in egg tempera on a linden board and then covered with gesso, a chalk glue based on linseed oil, which was used to fix the image instead of varnish. Due to the fact that the glue darkened over time, the artists periodically prescribed a new image on top of it.

In total, the icon was in the Trinity Cathedral for about 500 years. For most of this time, her salary was hidden from the parishioners. In 1575, Tsar Ivan the Terrible first presented the icon with a gold setting, in 1600 Boris Godunov presented a gold setting with precious stones. Since the 1800s, it was almost completely covered with a silver frame, from under which only the feet, hands and faces of angels were visible.

In 1904-1905, the restorer Vasily Guryanov found a way to remove the old coating and cleaned the icon of the most recent layers. In November 1918-January 1919, the cleaning process continued at the department of the Central State Restoration Workshops at the Sergievsky Museum of History and Art. The restorers managed to fully open the icon under the guidance of the artist Igor Grabar. After the restoration, the icon returned to the Trinity Cathedral and hung in it without a salary.

In the 1920s, after the restoration, the first reproductions of the Trinity were made. In 1929, many of the newly discovered medieval Russian icons were shown for the first time at an exhibition in Germany. The “Trinity” by Andrei Rublev did not leave the USSR, but its copy visited Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg and Munich. According to one version, the Soviet authorities were looking for buyers in this way.

In 1929, by order of the People’s Commissariat for Education of the RSFSR, Troitsa was transferred to the State Tretyakov Gallery for a temporary exhibition. Then the icon was assigned an inventory number and left in permanent storage. In 1941-1944, during the Great Patriotic War, the icon, along with other valuables, was evacuated to Novosibirsk.

On November 4, 1993, the restored church of the Kazan Icon of the Mother of God was opened in Moscow on Red Square. At its consecration, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said that Rublev’s Trinity would be returned to the Orthodox Church and housed in a special protective sarcophagus. Due to the protests of historians and cultural figures, the icon remained in the museum – opponents of the transfer noticed that it could be stored only under a special temperature and humidity regime.

In 2007, Troitsa temporarily moved from the Tretyakov Gallery in Lavrushinsky Lane to a building on Krymskaya Embankment during the Europe-Russia-Europe exhibition. After that, significant damage was found on the icon: the lag of the primer and the paint layer, the cracking of the base and the divergence of the boards at the joints. The restoration took about a year. In the next 15 years, the icon did not leave the Tretyakov Gallery.

On July 16, 2022, the icon was delivered to the Trinity-Sergius Lavra at the personal request of Patriarch Kirill. She was brought to the monastery to celebrate the 600th anniversary of finding the relics of Sergius of Radonezh. On July 19, 2022, Trinity was returned. In December of the same year, it became known that the icon returned to the exposition of the Tretyakov Gallery.