“The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity” will be on view at the Hermitage Rooms, Somerset House, from Thursday, March 30, to Sunday, September 3.

This major exhibition brings to London for the first time a collection of classical Greek, Roman and Byzantine luxury artworks from The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, including finely decorated silver and gold, Athenian red-figure vases and exquisite cameos. These objects, which have seldom been seen outside Russia before, tell a little-known story of the development of art and civilization over more than 6,000 years, from Sixth Century BC Greece to the Middle Ages, and they overturn familiar assumptions about the period.

The exhibition challenges the conventional idea that the new Christian art of the Byzantine Empire, usually represented by icon painting, rejected completely the artistic styles and themes of classical Greece and Rome. By looking at objects of luxury art from this period, rather than icons, the exhibition demonstrates the remarkable continuity of these classical traditions notably in precious metalwork, jewelry and ivory, at a time when classical art is usually thought to have died out completely. The State Hermitage Museum’s collections of this material, much of which was excavated from tombs and burials in the Crimea and its Russian hinterland in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, are unique and this exhibition will be the first to explore the implications of these discoveries in detail.

The exhibition begins around 500 BC in ancient Greece when artists perfected a way of representing the world that combined extraordinary fidelity to nature with ideals of harmony and beauty. This breakthrough in naturalistic art has become known as the “Greek Revolution” and it is epitomized in this exhibition by the depictions of figures in Athenian vase painting, most beautifully expressed in the famous “First Swallow of Spring” vase from the late Sixth Century BC.

Classical artistic values were inherited by the Romans from the Second Century BC onward. Roman artists continued to draw on Greek conventions and to develop the classical language of art in representations of traditional subject matter, as illustrated by delicately engraved gems and cameos. A cameo included in this exhibition is decorated with a lively scene of Alexander the Great hunting wild boar.

The second part of the exhibition explores the continuation of the classical legacy in the Byzantine world after Constantine the Great moved the heart of the Roman Empire from Italy to Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul). A rarely exhibited group of remarkably well preserved textiles, including a portrait of the goddess Ge, introduce the continuing interest in “pagan” mythological themes long after the rise of Christianity.

The survival of classicism in the Byzantine world, however, became most clearly apparent to scholars in the Twentieth Century from examples of gold and silver and other treasures discovered through excavations in Russian lands – sometimes far beyond the edges of the Eastern Roman Empire. These rich collections entered the Hermitage and have been subject to study by an international community of scholars in recent decades. A highlight of this part of the London exhibition will be a group of silver and silver-gilt dishes that can be dated accurately from control stamps on their bases to the Sixth and Seventh Centuries AD. This proves that they are the creation of medieval art despite their classical style, quality and imagery. One silver dish from the age of Justinian (527-565 AD) depicts a pastoral scene of a goatherd with his animals that harks back to the art of Hellenistic Greece.

The Hermitage rooms are in the South Building, Somerset House, Strand. For information, 020 7845 4630 or www.hermitagerooms.org.uk.