Three winged figures, their heads inclined and their robes shading from azure to gold, sit at a desk with a chalice within the center. God is absent, however the portray is divine. Andrei Rublev’s “Holy Trinity” is Russia’s most treasured icon. Painted within the fifteenth century when Russia was overrun by the Mongols, it reaffirmed the nation’s ties to Christian Europe and pointed in the direction of a Russian Renaissance that by no means got here, in keeping with Dmitry Likhachev, a Russian historian.
This most numinous of Russian icons is now serving the darkest trigger: Vladimir Putin’s battle in Ukraine. On July sixteenth the icon, which had been within the State Tretyakov Gallery since 1929, was moved on Kremlin orders (and towards the need of restorers) to the Trinity Lavra of St Sergius, the religious centre of Russia’s Orthodox church. There it was commemorated throughout the feast of St Sergius, a Russian saint who influenced Rublev. Patriarch Kirill, the top of the Russian church and a supporter of the battle, mentioned the icon “connects us to the time when our Russia, in great danger from foreign and domestic enemies, was concentrating on becoming a great power”.
Curators warned that dragging the icon to the church from the museum, the place it was saved at a exact temperature and humidity, may injury it. Dragging Russia into obscurantism is simply as damaging. The transfer had little to do with Christianity, and the whole lot to do with Mr Putin’s cult of battle.
Sergei Parkhomenko, a liberal journalist, in contrast Mr Putin to a pharoah attempting to “bribe” a deity: “Either he is very afraid of losing the war, and is asking for help. Or he is deciding to do something very scary—scary even to himself—and seeks forgiveness in advance.” Russia’s president not too long ago warned that his invasion “has not even started in earnest”. He may wish to heed the phrases of Voltaire, who was extra sceptical of faith: “God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.”
