Visitors to Byzantium: Treasures of a lost empire at London's Royal Academy of Arts are in for a treat. Over 350 seldom-seen artifacts from the museum's collection and others will be on display until March 22, 2009. Rachel Campbell-Johnston of the Times Online has a review.

From the article:

The show, assembling an extraordinary jumble of treasures, from coins to cutlery to processional crosses, through fresco paintings, wood carvings and embroidered silks, to ivory diptychs, brooches, icons (such as this one of St Theodore Tero) and bracelets, evokes an intriguing sense of the sprawling diversity of this civilisation. It sweeps through its history following the broadest of courses, but helping us to make a bit more sense of it along the way by ushering us into thematically organised galleries. There are sections that look at iconoclasm, for instance, or domestic lifestyle or the luxuries of court.

An online photo gallery may be viewed at http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1853552,00.html