Andrei Rublev's Holy Trinity (or Hospitality of Abraham) Icon | Orthodox Christian Canvas Icon

This icon reproduction is intended to commemorate the historic restoration of the original icon to the ownership of the Russian Orthodox Church on May 15, 2023. Until 1920 it was located at the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, near Moscow. At that time, under the new Soviet regime, it was relocated to a museum in Sergiyev Posad, and then in 1929 it was moved to the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. According to this report, the icon will be exhibited for public veneration in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow for a year, and then finally returned permanently to the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, its home since the 16th century.

St Andrei Rublev created his most famous icon, titled variously as “The Hospitality of Abraham” or “The Holy Trinity,” sometime in the early 15th century. 

While icon painters typically take as their templates forms long-ago established by the Orthodox Church (and documented in such sources as The Painter's Manual of Dionysius of Fourna), the Third Person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, will on occasion move an iconographer to “reveal” a new icon form, usually based on a prior one.

Such is the case with Rublev's Holy Trinity. It takes as its visual foundation the “Hospitality of Abraham,” based on the account from Genesis of the “three men” (three angels) who visited Abraham and Sarah at the Oak of Mamre, the “three men” symbolizing in their form and their unity the Three Persons of the Holy and Life-Creating Trinity. Since it was from Abraham’s seed that the nation of Israel would be birthed, and from Israel, the Theotokos, and from the Theotokos, the God-Man Jesus Christ, it's significant that the three angels who symbolized the Life-Creating Holy Trinity appeared to Abraham and Sarah, and foretold her giving birth to their first and only child Isaac, who would later father Jacob (Israel). Thus the Holy Trinity's presence at the conception of the nation consecrated for God’s purposes, Israel, prefigures the conception of God Himself in the flesh, in the form of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Divine Logos Jesus Christ. In both cases human seed was conceived through divine action, the will of the Uncreated made manifest in created human nature.

Rublev was inspired to make explicit the Trinitarian content of that fateful encounter with the Venerable Patriarch and his wife, the future great-grandparents of the patriarchs of the twelve tribes. As Sarah was too old to be able to bring forth children naturally, she was also the Old Testament type of the barren woman in Isaiah 54:1: “For the children of the desolate one will be more than the children of her who is married.” Thus she prefigures Righteous Anna, the Mother of the Theotokos and the Grandmother of Our Lord, and Righteous Elizabeth, the mother of St John the Forerunner. 

The ineffable Holy Trinity’s “appearance-in-type” (as opposed to “appearance-in-form”) to Abraham and Sarah is almost entirely unique in the history of humanity. Only one other time is such a blessed experience recorded: to St Alexander Svirsky in 1508, roughly a hundred years or less after St Andrei created his famous icon. 

Read more about this icon here.