The image of the holy fool is the mental image of Russian culture. The study of the visual in culture allows us to solve the following tasks: to identify the mental visual characteristics and images of both hagiography and iconography, in which the national mentality is expressed; to study the genesis of cultural tradition. The connection between words and images in the cultural consciousness is determined by mental characteristics. The interpenetration is a fact of their internal structure. The word is the protograph and archetype for expressing the image of the holy fool in the image. The image of the holy fool is comprehended by the cultural consciousness from the primary hallucinatory vision to epiphany and sacred knowledge. From mask to face, from face to face, there is a vector of comprehension of the image of the fool. The aesthetics of foolishness (holy fool) has a strong position in Russian culture. The phenomenon of foolishness is mastered in the cultural consciousness from the mental characteristics of the image to the tradition of the image, from the traditional image to the history of the visual.