This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Andrei Rublev's icon of the Holy Trinity, executed in tempera and levkas on a wood panel and dated by the State Tretyakov Gallery to between 1422 and 1427, depicts the three angelic visitors who appear to Abraham at the oak of Mamre in Genesis 18, a scene Christian tradition read as a veiled appearance of the Trinity long before Rublev painted it. Earlier depictions of the same scene typically included Abraham and Sarah receiving their visitors, keeping the narrative frame of the biblical story visible alongside its theological reading.
Rublev removed Abraham and Sarah from the composition entirely, a documented departure from the scene's usual pictorial treatment, and built a quiet, circular rhythm among the three seated figures around a chalice at the composition's center. That compositional choice shifts the icon away from illustrating a narrative episode and toward a direct visual meditation on the Trinity itself, the theological subject the scene had always been read as pointing toward rather than the hospitality story it depicts on its surface.
The icon was commissioned for the Trinity Cathedral of the monastery Sergius of Radonezh founded, placing Rublev's compositional departure inside a specific liturgical setting from the start rather than as a private artistic experiment later adopted for church use, a documented origin that ties the painting's theological ambition to the institution that first displayed it.