Brave new world

All empires eventually bite off more than they can chew. Rome and the Barbarians, the latest exhibition under the new management at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, suffers from the same syndrome. It aims to cover the entire first millennium of the Christian era by displaying more than 2,000 artefacts, from 200 collections in 23 countries, the material remains of Greeks, Romans and scores of barbarian peoples, from the Alamanni, Avars, Franks and Huns to the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals and Vikings.

There are some fine things here: a number of good Roman sculptures; wonderful ivory diptychs from Aosta, Florence, Novara, Rome, Paris and Liège; exceptional silverware, including the late 4th- to early 5th-century ‘Achilles Shield’ platter (fished out of the Rhône in 1656); the magnificent first-century Hildesheim Treasure from Berlin, and the ‘Meerstadtplatte’, with its exquisite engraved and gilded roundel of a port city, from Switzerland; glittering gold cloisonné ornaments and jewellery from sites scattered across Europe; rare books, from a 6th-century Arian text ‘On the Trinity’ to an 8th-century Irish gospel.