The icon is originally from a series depicting the four Evangelists that would have made up a pair of Royal Doors in the iconostasis of a 16th century church. St Mark is shown seated and writing in the traditional pose of the evangelists, a form taken from the author portraits of antiquity and seen in illuminated gospel books where such a portrait is on the first page. In the best traditions of the high art of Russian in the 15th and 16th centuries, the space in which the figure is enclosed is a sacred space whose structural lack of logic leads the viewer to the non-material world of the spirit.