The Eleousa (Tenderness)

The Child presses His cheek against His mother’s and she inclines her head to Him, and in most of them she is looking out of the icon rather than at Him, with an expression that is not happiness. The type says two things at once: the Incarnation is real enough for a child to cling, and she already knows. The Vladimir icon, brought from Constantinople to Kiev in the twelfth century and afterwards the palladium of Moscow, is the most famous of them. Where the Hodegetria points, the Eleousa holds, and the two types between them cover most of the Marian icons in any Orthodox church.