The icon shows the Mother of God enthroned with the Christ Child on her knee, an image type that originates in Byzantine apse mosaics of the 10th-12th centuries, and which transfers to Russia in the art of Dionysi, the great Moscow painter active in the late 15th century. An icon in the Menil Collection Museum in Houston TX, related to a fresco in the Ferapontov Monastery by the White Sea, is close in composition and in colour to our example [1] She is attended by Saints Zossim and Savatii, founders of the famous Transfiguration Monastery on the island of Solovki, by the shores of the White Sea in the 15th century.

[1] See Annemarie Weyl Carr ed. Imprinting the Divine, Byzantine and Russian icons from the Menil Collection. Yale university press, 2012, p. 118.