Those who associate graduate school with penury and physical discomfort — seminar rooms that are overheated in winter, hours spent among the dusty stacks — may be surprised by the luxurious interior of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, a new scholarly research center and graduate program affiliated with New York University, housed in a townhouse off Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Founded in 2006 with $200 million from the Leon Levy Foundation, the institute is currently hiring faculty and won’t begin accepting graduate applications until the fall. In the meantime, however, it has completed a stylish renovation by Selldorf Architects, the firm that did the interiors of the Neue Galerie. Next week it will open its first public exhibition, “Wine, Worship, and Sacrifice: The Golden Graves of Ancient Vani.”

Vani was a religious and administrative center in the ancient kingdom of Colchis, in the present-day Republic of Georgia. It has been regularly excavated since the 1940s, and its graves have turned up ancient jewelry, sculpture, and a variety of vessels associated with the making and ritual consumption of wine. (Colchis, which is known from Greek mythology as the land where Jason went in search of the Golden Fleece, was in fact, as the myth suggests, very rich in gold.)

Despite the significance of the finds there, Vani is not well-known, and the catalog for the current exhibition is the first extended discussion of the site in English. Located between ancient Greece and Persia, and influenced by both, Colchis is simultaneously too Eastern to fall within the purview of historians of Classical art, and too Western to interest scholars of the Near East.

This made it an apt subject for the inaugural exhibition at the institute, whose mission is to bring together scholars working in many disciplines and across the entire range of the ancient world, including Asia and Africa.

Most Classics departments tend to be narrowly focused on the West, just as specialists on the Near East tend not to know much about the Mediterranean world, the director of the institute, Roger Bagnall, explained.

“We’re not trying to have a program where everybody knows a little bit about everything,” Mr. Bagnall said, “but to create a structure where there is a continuing conversation across the lines of geography and discipline, so people know what people in other fields are doing, and so that we can train a generation of young scholars who will have a broader background.”

The institute has its own board, whose chairwoman is Shelby White. Ms. White, with her late husband, Leon Levy, built in the span of several decades a major collection of antiquities; they also financed excavations and established a fund to support publication of research. Several pieces from the Levy-White collection are currently on view at the Met, where the couple donated $20 million toward the creation of the new Greek and Roman galleries. Asked if the institute has a policy about publishing on or exhibiting unprovenanced artifacts, as some museums today do, Mr. Bagnall said he was “trying not to make any long-term policy decision now that doesn’t have to be made,” but he added that the issue would be addressed when the faculty was in place. (In January, after 18 months of negotiations with Italian officials, Ms. White agreed to cede 10 objects from her collection to Italy.) “So far everything that we have decided to do involves borrowing antiquities from public collections abroad, which contain the finds of organized excavations,” Mr. Bagnall said.

In an e-mail through her spokesman, Fraser Seitel, Ms. White suggested that her and her husband’s belief in the need for an interdisciplinary institute emerged from their collecting experiences. “We could see the influence of East and West in a Parthian rhyton or a fifth century Greek protome, which looked as if it had an Oriental influence,” she said. “We saw the connections and felt it important to create a place where different cultures could be studied to appreciate their interdependence.”

The institute has received 380 applications for what will likely be eight faculty positions, including Mr. Bagnall’s and another that is already filled. That hire, announced recently, is Alexander Jones, a historian of ancient science who will have a joint appointment at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

The institute’s public programs, which will include exhibitions and lectures, serve both an altruistic and a slightly selfish purpose, Mr. Bagnall said. If professors want students to continue to get excited about and enter the field, “We can’t just wait and see who shows up for graduate school,” he said. “We have to reach people earlier.” So, although the faculty at the institute will not be required to teach undergraduates, they may choose to, Mr. Bagnall said. He has also begun a discussion about a possible partnership between the institute and the Brooklyn Latin School, a specialized public high school that opened in Williamsburg in 2006.

The exhibition on Vani, which consists of loans from the Georgian National Museum, came about through the institute’s ties to the Freer and Sackler Galleries at the Smithsonian in Washington. The director there, Julian Raby, had seen an exhibition of gold from Vani in Berlin and mentioned it to the institute’s associate director for exhibitions and public programs, Jennifer Chi. Although Ms. Chi had just assumed her position in September — she was previously the curator of the Levy-White collection — she and Mr. Raby decided to jointly bring a similar exhibition to America. (The exhibition was on view at the Sackler from December to February.)

“It was a perfect example of the mission of the institute: to bring awareness to a very important and rich culture, but one that has been traditionally underrepresented,” Ms. Chi said.

The objects in the exhibition reflect the full range of Colchian artists’ work, from delicate bronze figurines, dated from between the fourth and the first centuries B.C.E., that look almost African, to a second-century B.C.E. bronze torso of a youth that clearly reflects the influence of Greek sculpture.

The director of the Georgian National Museum, David Lordkipanidze, said he was very pleased that finds from Vani were being exhibited in America for the first time. “It’s an opportunity for us to [call attention to] Georgian heritage and Georgian science,” he said.

Scholars’ understanding of Vani is still fragmentary. There does not appear to have been a written language, and the only textual sources are accounts by Greek historians. There is also much more work to be done excavating the site itself. Currently, part of the site is occupied by modern houses, but Mr. Lordkipanidze said he expects that the Georgian government will eventually take possession of the land. Someday, he said, he hopes that the site and the archeological museum there will become a tourist attraction.

“It’s quite photogenic,” he said.

Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, March 12 until June 1 (15 E. 84th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-992-7800).