Pure luxury from St Petersburg

The opening of a 'daughter' gallery for the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg five years ago at Somerset House made a wonderful addition to London's art scene. This inspired venture has so far brought us several themed exhibitions of treasures from the Russian city, staged in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art, its London neighbour.

Each of these revolving exhibitions, settling in for an extended stay of several months, has brought us works of art, little known or never before shown here.

The very setting by the river recalls their own home on the embankment of the Neva, of which it is most touchingly reminiscent during the months when the fountains in the courtyard yield place to ice skaters, fitfully illuminated in the winter dusk.

The current exhibition, The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity, reaches new heights. In a show promising 'luxury arts' we rightly expect to find objects of great beauty and rarity, but the theme here is the longevity and persistence of subjects and forms from classical antiquity in Christian Byzantium, so often considered a world of formalism, rigidity and the limited subject-matter exemplified by Greek and Russian icons.

Art historians from the Courtauld Institute and curators from St Petersburg have joined to select objects from the riches of the Hermitage to illustrate this theme, and both Russian and English scholars among them the Oxford Byzantinist Marlia Mango have contributed introductory essays to the catalogue volume, and, it should be said, that the exemplary texts and the entries with their colour illustrations make up an almost lightweight, and at £20 affordable, catalogue volume.

Hardly another country bar Egypt would be able to illuminate this theme so largely from its own wealth of objects, many recovered from finds and excavations on the shores of the Black Sea, brilliantly juxtaposed with such a significant star object as the ivory Veroli casket from the V&A. Other objects stem from the collections of knowlegeable connoisseurs among Russians of the past two centuries.

Were we to seek the evidence in the vast rooms of the Hermitage itself, we should be lost among its plethora of objects. The beauty of the London Hermitage branch is that it consists of a mere five rooms a human scale, in which each object can be appreciated at leisure for itself and within its themed group.

The ancient objects, demonstrating figural decorations on painted vases, silver vessels and a piece of sumptuous gold armour from an excavated Scythian grave, are shown next to a group of Greek and Roman engraved gems, cameos and intaglios, exhibiting a similar brilliant figural style on a miniature scale.

They have been selected from the 10,000 ancient gems in the collection, some previously unpublished. These gems reached the Hermitage in the neo-classical late 18th century, collected in Rome by immensely wealthy Russian aristocrats in emulation of Catherine the Great, who was besotted with gems. But on late antique and early medieval gems, as on later gold rings, we also find Christian symbols, while a 4th century AD cameo of exceptional size, once again a Russian collector's trophy, depicts the crowning of the Emperor Constantine by the City Goddess of Constantinople.

This splendid late example of imperial propaganda, emulating the cameos celebrating the Julio-Claudian emperors, was retouched, we are told, by the Roman engraver Benedetto Pistrucci, who was later to find a lucrative career in England.

Yet more astonishing, as emanating from the capital of Justinian whom we are accustomed to visualise in his hieratic pose in the Ravenna mosaic, is a large silver dish with a herdsman among his animals, its bucolic charm so reminiscent of Hellenistic rural genre scenes.

Rarities of a different kind are a number of remarkably well-preserved textiles from Egypt, dating from the 4th and 5th centuriesy of our era. They were the work of Christian Coptic craftsmen, yet their imagery most often depicts ancient myths and pagan deities, like the Earth goddess Gaia or Ge, with flowers in her hair in a flowered frame, but crowned by a golden disk with an image of the ancient Egyptian sacred serpent, the uraeus.

These textiles not only demonstrate the theme of the exhibition, the continuous further development of ancient images and traditions in the Christian Byzantine era, but, brought to Russia towards the end of the 19th century, they demonstrate the dominance of fashion in collecting.

In contrast to the engraved gems garnered in neo-classical Rome a hundred years before, the fashion for all things Egyptian gripped late 19th-century Russia just as much as the rest of Europe.

The exhibition on the Strand, which runs to September 3, is accompanied by regular lunchtime talks. For further information email info@somerset-house.org.uk or call 020 7845 4600n. Lastly, the Hermitage shop at Somerset House, unique of its kind, offers attractive objects made in Russia.