Andrei Rublev was a Russian monk who painted icons, the images of Christ and the saints that Orthodox Christians pray before. He worked in and near Moscow in the early 1400s, and he is the most famous icon painter in Russian history.
His best-known work, The Trinity, shows three angels seated at a table. The Russian Orthodox Church declared him a saint in 1988.
Finding the man behind the name is harder. Rublev signed nothing, no letter or text of his survives, and nobody knows where he was born. What remains is a few lines in monastery chronicles, the yearly records in which monks wrote down the events of their time, and one panel of wood.
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The first chronicle line dates from 1405, when the Grand Prince of Moscow was having a cathedral painted inside the Kremlin, the walled citadel at the heart of the city. It lists the masters in order: Theophanes the Greek, Prokhor the elder from Gorodets and, last of all, the monk Andrei Rublev.
In 1408 a chronicle names him again, at work in Vladimir, an old princely city east of Moscow, beside a painter called Daniil. Those two entries are the firmest record of his career, and everything else has to be pieced together around them.
Churches and museums credit him with dozens of works, but scholars accept only one icon as entirely his, The Trinity. Even its origin rests on a legend written down more than two hundred years after his death.
His fame never waited for proof. Little more than a century after his death, a Church council was already telling icon painters to work as Rublev had worked. The Trinity, meanwhile, spent more than three centuries under a cover of gold and has passed between Church and state ever since.
From a monastery to the Kremlin
Before that first chronicle entry, almost nothing about him is certain. The trail that leads Rublev into the Kremlin starts in a monastery northeast of Moscow, with an abbot named Nikon who allowed him to leave it.
What You'll Discover
What the chronicles actually say.
Which icons are really his.
What happened to the Trinity in 1904.
How a painter became a saint.
Where his grave went.
Where the Trinity hangs now.