The icon is a revelation of transfiguration. We were made in the image and likeness of God, but the image has been damaged and the likeness lost. Since Adam and Eve, only in Jesus Christ were these attributes fully intact. The icon shows the recovery of wholeness. Over centuries of development, iconographers gradually developed a way of communicating physical reality illuminated by the hidden spiritual life. The icon suggests the transfiguration that occurs in whoever, as the Orthodox say, has "acquired the Holy Spirit." The icon is thus a witness to theosis: deification. "God became human so that the human being could become God."
— Jim Forest, Praying with Icons