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Everybody has heard of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire since the 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon gave his celebrated book that catchy title. But how about Roman art, did that also disappear?

The answer to that is no, as is demonstrated by The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity, a choice small show on at the Hermitage Rooms at London's Somerset House until Sept. 3. This has been selected from the fabulous collection of antiquities in the Hermitage, in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The venue is just a suite of five rooms, but the quality is high, making this one of the more enjoyable and instructive shows of classical art in London in a long time.

It begins, as it should, with the ancient Greeks. The first gallery is filled with works from the fourth and fifth centuries BC: jewellery, magnificent painted pottery and a superb golden cover for a bow-and-arrow case once owned by a Scythian chieftain.

Many of these objects were excavated on the northern coast of the Black Sea in what is now southern Ukraine, an area colonized by Greek cities in antiquity.

The Scythians, a tribal people who ruled on the steppe, were, as far as the Greeks were concerned, the original barbarians, meaning they didn't speak Greek but made funny sounds that sounded like “ba-ba.”

The burial mounds of the Scythians, sometimes crammed with precious objects made by Greek craftsmen, dot the plains near the Black Sea. These graves were investigated by Russian archaeologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries and their contents removed to St. Petersburg. The point about the Scythians is that they were among the first to import Greek art, simply because they liked it.

The exhibition rapidly moves on to the period known as Late Antiquity. This was the age in which, especially after the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in the fourth century AD, classical art began to morph.

A silver-gilt bowl showing the triumph of Emperor Constantius II (mid-fourth century) illustrates what happened.

In contrast with the naturalistic, sculptural figures on the chieftain's bow case 900 years earlier, the late Roman emperor is flat and stylized. His face stares rigidly frontward and is too big for his body, which in turn is too big for his horse. This already looks like a piece of medieval art.

A series of silver plates made in Constantinople in the fifth and sixth centuries AD are the star exhibits and they are in something approaching a pure classical manner. In the most beautiful, made between 613 and 639 AD, a drunken and portly Silenus dances with a maenad, one of the nymphs who accompanied Dionysus, the god of wine, just as if the empire had not been Christian for three centuries.

It seems that Byzantine gentlemen, just like Victorian ones, still liked a little mythological art even if they didn't believe in the ancient Olympians, and probably for the same reason — it was the sign of a good education.

One of the pieces, a fourth-century head of the earth goddess Gaia, now revered once more by Greens, is so fresh it could have been made last year.

For more information, visit www.hermitagerooms.com.

Bloomberg