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, the single most reproduced and most theologically discussed icon in Russian Orthodoxy, remains at the center of a major and still unresolved custody dispute between Russia's museum community and the Russian Orthodox Church since 2023, a controversy that places a work nearly six centuries old at the middle of a live contemporary institutional conflict rather than leaving it as settled museum property.
The dispute sets the icon's documented history as a museum held cultural artifact, cared for under conservation standards developed for an object of its age and fragility, against its original purpose as a liturgical image commissioned for the Trinity Cathedral of Sergius of Radonezh's own monastery, a use the Church argues should still govern where and how the icon is kept. That the same object can be claimed as both a national museum treasure and an active liturgical icon is exactly what makes the custody question difficult to resolve rather than a straightforward property matter.
That a fifteenth century panel painting remains the subject of an active, unresolved dispute in the 2020s marks the Trinity icon's documented significance as extending past art history and theology into present day institutional conflict, a controversy still open rather than a settled chapter in the icon's six centuries of documented history.