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[Alexandr Korol]

“A similar allegorical depiction of purity of soul in the form of a maiden in a royal crown, who has vanquished the dragon and bound the lion (symbols of conquered passions), goes back to the engraving “Purity as a Most Beautiful Maiden,” published as a broadside by the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra in 1627. A similar subject is found in painted lubok prints and illustrated synodicons, but much more rarely in icons.

Among all these themes, special fortune befell the folk picture “Purity of Soul,” borrowed from old murals of tsarist and boyar chambers: examples of such an “icon,” or rather painting, preserved in the Russian Museum from the 17th and 18th centuries, represent purity of soul no longer in the form of a monk in a cross- bearing pose, but in the image of a “most beautiful and crowned maiden,” standing on the moon, “shining to the whole world,” and holding in her left hand on a tether a lion (a symbol of tamed passion and anger) and “with which she pours upon the earth a chalice with her tears,” “extinguishing the decay of sin, and the serpent with her humility,” while in a hellish cave the sinful soul weeps. Such is the interpretation, shared with folk lubok pictures, and later; another, more ancient, gives the image of “purity” in a halo, descending to the earth, from the Savior in the clouds, and below the lion and the serpent on the ground. — Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov, “Russian Icon.”