Icône Icon Ikone Trinity Of The Old Testament

Size 22.1cm x 18.5cm
Egg tempera painting on a lime wood panel with two sponkies embedded at the top.

This biblical report of the visit of the three angelic men to Abraham, already understood in early Christian times as an allegory of the Trinity, was considered for over a millennium as the only source on which icon art could rely in order to give pictorial expression to the mystery of the divine Trinity. Only in this so-called Old Testament form could the Eastern Church theology imagine the Holy Trinity.
An iconological interpretation says that the left angel embodies God the Father, the middle one represents the Son of God and the right one represents the Holy Spirit.

The banquet with Abraham and his wife Sarah is depicted in the center of the icon panel.
In the background there is always a piece of architecture on the left, a rock on the right and a tree in the middle that symbolizes the Mamre grove.
These image details are said to go back to the description of a Russian pilgrim who claimed to have seen the Mamre grove like this at the beginning of the 12th century.

In the upper edge of the icon the title is written in Church Slavonic script:
"Holy Trinity"

The painting and coloring of the icon panel presented refer to the capital Moscow in the period around 1850.

A collector's item!