Representation as indwelling: Contextualizing Michael Psellos’ empsychos graphe across artistic, liturgical, and literary theory Roland Betancourt University of California, Irvine roland.betancourt@uci.edu Through terms that articulate the arts as the results of divine possession or inspiration, the writings of Byzantine thinkers repeatedly expressed the manner in which representation was believed to operate as a form of divine indwelling occurring beyond the skill and originality of the artist, writer, or performer. Beyond ideas of naturalism or style, the literary, visual, and performance arts arose through the event of divine participation. The goal of this article is to contextualize the concept of empsychos graphe, as articulated by Michael Psellos, within a longer and broader history of similar concepts across literary, liturgical, and artistic thought. Keywords: empsychos graphe; Michael Psellos; entheos; inspiration; typos In art historical scholarship, the concept of “living painting” (ἔμψυχοςγραwὴ) in the work of Michael Psellos has drawn attention to the implications of artistic representation as a form of indwelling or divine inspiration. At times, the term’s usage has been signalled as unique to Psellos’ thinking about the icon. However, the goal of the present article is to survey a wide range of sources that use empsychos and related words to conceptualize strategies of representation. By looking at this and other terms’ handling by writers thinking about visual art, liturgy, theology, literature, and performance, the aim is to give readers a better sense of the variety and cohesion of this line of thought. The article by no means presents a comprehensive survey, but instead each section presents a microhistory of these terms in artistic, liturgical, and literary theory in the Middle Byzantine world. These three threads nuance our understanding of terms such as empsychos, typos, and entheos, by engaging their ancient and late-antique precedents in order to contextualize how learned authors, such as Psellos, would have understood the usage of these terms within secular and religious milieus, both Pagan and Christian. This article deliberately brings together an eclectic range of textual and visual evidence in order to show the consistency, continuation, and cohesion of this thinking. Moreover, © Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 2020 DOI: 10.1017/byz.2019.24 Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 44 (1) 62–85 available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/byz.2019.24 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Irvine Libraries, on 19 Feb 2020 at 17:29:14, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use,