Everything in this icon bathes in an atmosphere of intense joy. A leading iconographer, the monk Gregory Kroug (1969), who rediscovered the soul and spirit of those master iconographers of the great Tradition, states in his Notebook of an icon painter: “The Birth of the Theotokos is the final preparation of humanity to receive the Divinity.”
Michel Quenot, The Icon, Window on the Kingdom. St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1991.