ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the painting in the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries and the ways in which changes in its forms and viewing have been detected, described and interpreted in recent art history. The term 'living painting' or 'animated scripture' emerges as a way of describing how belief is represented and communicated by art. The problem is therefore how far 'living painting' is a new production of the Middle Byzantine period, and how far this particular rhetoric of viewing found in the texts can be linked with artistic innovation. The question is whether we can extract from Byzantine writing a 'documented' contemporary perception of change, and the identification of this as 'living painting'. Hans Belting argues that we see the invention of a new style of painting, consciously recognized by intellectuals as 'living painting'. He also refers to the inventories of monastic typika as describing works 'in the new style'.
