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The ambition of Michael Psellos on Literature and Art is to illustrate an important chapter in the history of Greek literary and art criticism and introduce precisely this aspect of Psellian writing to a wider public.

Byzantium/Modernism examines the cross-temporal interchange between Byzantium and modernism and articulates how and why Byzantine art and image theory can contribute to our understanding of modern and contemporary visual culture.

Monumental picture programs of Byzantine churches exist within a spatial and liturgical setting of rituals that depend on circumstances that create a distinction from profane to sacred. The core theme is the epic narrative of the holy drama of the incarnated son, i.e., the image of God (eikon tou theou), acknowledged as indivisibly as much human as divine. In a Byzantine religious sense, images of Christ prove the incarnation, yet human salvation depends on faith in the incarnation but also in the transcendent unknowable God. From the perspective of visual culture, the dilemma is that divine nature is, in a religious sense, transcendent and unknowable, beyond words and categorizations, unintelligible, as opposed to human nature, which is intelligible. This article concerns the strategy of Byzantine visual culture to weave together expressible and inexpressible in order to acknowledge \"right belief,\" without trespassing the theology and mode of thought of the church fathers on the triune mystery of the Christian God and the incarnation. In a Byzantine religious sense, circumscribed by time and space, the human condition is inconsistent with cognition of what God is. Nonetheless, salvation depends on faith in that God is, a \"fact\" acknowledged through holy images. Particular theoretical and methodological focus will be on how the three fourth-century Cappadocian fathers and Dionysius the Areopagite, but also Maximus the Confessor discuss God's unintelligibility but also intelligibility, with some comparative Platonic outlooks.

The quintessence of Byzantine faith is the twofold identification of the God-Man. Yet, the image of God Jesus Christ and the transcendent Trinity is a one-God concept. Inevitability, I argue Byzantine aesthetics had to recognize God as both anthropomorphous and divine. Since, omission of God's divinity would verify God as divisible. In line with apophatic theology, Byzantine aesthetics used non-categorizations and non-identifications, what I denominate meta-images, to teach about God's divinity and that God is. Since \"holy\" equals right (ὀρθοδόξως) manner and right teaching about God (θεολογία), anything else would have been heresy. The desired effect of salvation would come to naught if the image did not concur with 'right opinion' (ὀρθοδοξία). Contemplation and imitation as well as communion with God depend on aesthetics 'of right belief' (ὀρθόδοξος). God is Beauty and God is Truth, and vice versa. In context of aesthetics, the idea of beauty refers to potential impetus to restore the natural image in the believer. Beauty identifies in deification (θέωσις), spiritual knowledge of the supreme beauty of God. Beauty does not refer to the perishable, but to the imperishable, not to physical strength and vigor, but to spiritual strength, yearning, and purity. Aesthetic approaches that help believers go beyond physical law to divine law, beyond the corporeal mundane to spiritual knowledge are good and beautiful. Interaction of narration, flattened corporeality, inverted perspectives, and meta-images such as light, brilliance, and patterned borders identifies the twofold reality of God and the historical event within and beyond time and space. This interaction of Incarnation (human visibility/suffering in the flesh) and Grace (divine incomprehensibility) refers to the Beauty of God, the prerequisite for salvation of humankind.