Andrei Rublev was a Russian monk and icon painter who worked in Moscow and the towns around it in the early 1400s, and he is the most famous icon painter in Russian history. He was born around 1360 and died around 1430. The Russian Orthodox Church made him a saint in 1988. He is remembered for The Trinity, three angels around a table, the only icon scholars accept as entirely his.
The saint is harder to find than his name suggests. Rublev signed nothing, and no letter or text of his survives. Nobody knows where he was born, and the year of his death moves between 1427 and 1430 depending on the source. What remains is a few lines in monastery chronicles and one panel of wood.
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The first chronicle line about him dates from 1405, and his name comes last. The Grand Prince of Moscow was having a cathedral painted inside the Kremlin, and the monastery chronicle lists the masters: Theophanes the Greek, Prokhor the elder from Gorodets, and the monk Andrei Rublev.
In 1408 he is named again, for the cathedral at Vladimir, beside a painter called Daniil. Those two lines 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. Scholars accept one icon as entirely his, and even its story rests on a legend written down more than two hundred years after his death.
Yet the fame never waited for the proof. In 1551 a council of the Church told icon painters to work as the Greeks painted and as Andrei Rublev painted. In 1988 the Church declared him a saint. Between the two chronicle lines and the sainthood lies one wooden panel, and what happened to it is stranger than anything said about the man.
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.