Daniel Chorny

Holy Venerable Daniel Chorny was an icon painter in Moscow, the teacher and fellow faster of Venerable Andrei Rublev. He is thought to have been born around the year 1350, but the date is very uncertain. Neither his birthplace nor his parents are known. It is also not known when he met Venerable Andrei, to whom he was not only a teacher in the craft of painting but also a companion in spiritual thought and a friend. In the opinion of researchers, he became a monk at the Spaso-⁠Andronikov Monastery in Moscow or at another monastery of the metropolitan, and was distinguished by strictness of life. The nickname Chorny, the Black, is first mentioned in the Tale of the Holy Icon Painters, from the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century; in earlier sources he is called only Daniel. The work of the two venerable ones is so unified that present-⁠day scholarship regards the separation of their works as extremely hard.

The witness of Saint Joseph

Venerable Joseph of Volotsk writes, from the words of the elder Spyridon, abbot of the Holy Trinity Monastery, that the icon painters Andrei Rublev and Daniel Chorny were very virtuous and zealous in fasting and in monastic labour and for this were found worthy of divine grace. Full of divine love, they never occupied themselves with earthly things, but always raised their mind and thought to the immaterial and divine light, and directed the bodily eye to the images of the Master Christ, of His Most Pure Mother and of all the saints. On the feast of the Bright Resurrection of Christ they had the holy icons before them and gazed on them unwaveringly, filled with divine joy, and not only on this day but on the other days when they were not painting. For this, writes Joseph, the Master Christ glorified them also at the hour of death. First Andrei departed, then his fellow faster Daniel also fell ill. On his deathbed he saw Andrei, who had fallen asleep, in great glory, calling him joyfully to eternal blessedness.

The last years

Their last works they performed at the monastery of Venerable Sergius of Radonezh. There, after the finding of his relics, Daniel and Andrei Rublev painted the cathedral of the Holy Trinity, with the blessing of Venerable Nikon. After the works were finished, the painters returned to the Andronikov Monastery, where they lived for a while; at the end of life both were elders of the monastery. They fell asleep around the years 1427 to 1430, at an interval of at least forty days. They were buried in different graves, but without doubt beside each other, in the cemetery of the monastery, southwest of the Savior Cathedral. In time the graves came to lie under the bell tower built at the southwest corner of the church. According to the Alphabet of Russian Saints by the monk Jonah of the Old Believer Kerzhenets monastery, compiled in the early nineteenth century, their graves still existed in the second half of the eighteenth century, until 1797-1798. The reconstructions in the Andronikov Monastery at the end of that century did not spare the burials of the painters; they were levelled and forgotten.

Veneration

Of the icons of Venerable Daniel and Andrei it was said already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that they were all wonderworking. In the Book of Degrees, compiled under the direction of Metropolitan Macarius of Moscow and the tsar's confessor Athanasius in 1560 to 1563, Venerable Andrei and Daniel are called God-⁠inspired masters. No one doubted their holiness. They are commemorated on 19 July, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Radonezh, and on 5 September, in the Synaxis of the Saints of Moscow.