Andrei Rublev

He was a monk, and then he was a painter, and probably he understood these as the same vocation. Andrei Rublev worked in Moscow and its surroundings during one of the most violent and uncertain periods of Russian history — the decades following the Mongol occupation — and what he made in that darkness was something so serene it still stops people cold.

We know very little about Rublev's life. He was a disciple of the icon-painting tradition from Mount Athos in Greece; he may have trained under the great Byzantine master Theophanes the Greek. He worked on the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow and the Cathedral of the Dormition in Vladimir. But his supreme achievement is a single panel: the Trinity icon, painted around 1411.

What separates Rublev from his contemporaries is color and space. Where other icon painters worked in the traditional Byzantine register of dark, heavily outlined figures against rigid gold, Rublev used color as light — clear, silvery blues and greens and ochres that seem to glow from within. And he created around his figures a strange, weightless silence — as if the image existed just slightly outside gravity.

He was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1988. It took them a while.