This pair of icons are the upper section of a pair of Royal Doors, so called because of the passage of the sacraments, the 'King of Glory', through them during the liturgy. They are situated in the middle of the iconostasis of an Orthodox church.

In the best traditions of medieval Russian icon-painting, the artist follows a scheme that helps the onlooker focus on the event's mystical meaning and makes no concession to the western taste for literalism and naturalism that was soon to pervade the icons the the 17th and 18th centuries. The plain pale-ochre background (few Russian ateliers could afford gold), the absence of shadows (the figures are themselves sources of light), the dream-like illogicalities of the architecture indicating a spiritual space rather than the structure of our three-dimensional world and the festive non-naturalistic colours all combine to take us beyond the space-time of the ordinary world. When the great 14th century Rhineland mystic Meister Eckhart, citing Augustine, asks what is the purpose of celebrating the historical birth of Christ if he cannot celebrate the event in eternity within himself, he is appealing to the same vision expressed in the icon. The non-naturalism of forms and colours in icons creates a language capable of stating symbolically what cannot be stated literally.