In the featured 16th-century Nativity icon, everything looks typical for the standard nativity scene. The only distinctive feature that you might have noticed is the blue background, which is rarely seen in Russian iconography. It is known that the work belongs to the Moscow school of icon painting, which inherited some of the features intrinsic to Andrei Rublev’s style. However, it doesn’t explain the choice of deep blue, usually described as a mystical and noble color.














