Icons and church art
With Christianity, the Byzantine image came to Kievan Rus'. In Novgorod, Vladimir and Moscow the icon became the heart of Russian art, with Andrei Rublev as its greatest master.
In 988 Grand Prince Vladimir of Kyiv had himself and his people baptised after the Byzantine model. With the Church came master builders, mosaicists and icon painters from Constantinople, and in the 11th century St Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv was given mosaics and frescoes in the same style as in Byzantium.
The icon is a holy image painted on wood, and it follows fixed models. It is not meant to show the world as it looks but to be a window onto the divine: the figures are elongated and still, the background is often gold, and the perspective can be reversed, so that the lines widen towards the viewer.
After the Mongol conquest in the 13th century, the tradition lived on in cities such as Novgorod, with its clear reds and greens, and in Moscow, which was growing in power. Around 1400 icon painting reached a high point with Theophanes the Greek and Andrei Rublev, whose Trinity icon is regarded as the supreme work of Russian painting.