XX Century
A well-to-do British travel-writer and art critic, one of the
famous literary circle known as the "Bright Young Things",
Robert Byron devoted much of his short life to fighting the
traditional Western prejudice against "Byzantium". At a time
when both mediæval and modern Greek culture were routinely
dismissed as "degenerate", Byron argued that Byzantine art
surpassed not only its classical antecedents but in fact nearly
all Western art before the XX Century.
His remarkable cultural history The Byzantine Achievement
(1929) was intended as an answer to Gibbon's Decline and Fall,
and, from its publication on, the tide of scholarly opinion indeed
began to turn, however slowly. Unfortunately, to the extent
that Byron is remembered today it is not for his deep exploration
of Eastern Christian spirituality (which stopped short,
however, of conversion to Orthodoxy),
nor for his magnificently illustrated
account of Mt. Athos (The Station), but
(such is the strength of Western "Orientalism") for
his Afghan travelogue The Road to Oxiana --- and,
of course, for his membership in a brilliant and decadent social set.
![[St. Pachomius Library]](title.gif)