In an excellent catalog essay for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exquisite, concentrated show “Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum,” the V&A’s Paul Williamson informs us that “[e]very medieval or Renaissance work of art has a story to tell.” For most antiquities, however, their stories — whether through plunder, dislocation, recycling, or destruction by invaders or iconoclasts — involve eventual ruin.

The very few artworks from antiquity that have survived owe their survival to everything from thievery and reinvention to idolatry and dumb luck. Often it all comes down to one person: Among some of the most important custodians of antiquity, Mr. Williamson cites Charlemagne, who, during the early ninth century, spearheaded and inspired a revival of interest in all things ancient Roman; Abbot Suger of St. Denis (1121-51), who almost single-handedly created the Gothic age; collectors such as J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), whose medieval treasury became the foundation of the Met, and John Charles Robinson, the V&A’s first curator.

Mr. Williamson tells us that Robinson, with objet in one hand and revolver in the other, comes across more as a 19th-century Indiana Jones than as the scholarly connoisseur he most certainly was; and that his adventurous and dangerous exploit abroad, acquiring doomed European artworks in Italy and Spain, “makes present-day curatorial practice sound rather dull.” Obviously, the swashbuckling days of museum curators rushing into Venice (or anywhere else for that matter), as Robinson did, to salvage antiquities from imminent destruction are long gone. But that does not mean we cannot enjoy the fruits of their labors.

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, in part thanks to Robinson, holds one of the world’s finest collections of European decorative arts. The occasion for “Medieval and Renaissance Treasures,” organized by the V&A and at the Met by Peter Barnet, Michel David-Weill, and Ian Wardropper, is the renovation and reinstallation of the V&A’s new Medieval and Renaissance galleries, which will open in the fall of 2009. The exhibition comprises 35 small-scale masterpieces dating from 300 to 1600, most of which have never before been exhibited in New York. It includes a “Leonardo Notebook” (1487-90), a portrait painting on enamel, a silvered- and gilt-copper Italian “Reliquary Bust of St. Antigius” (c. 1505-10), Anglo-Saxon broaches, a 14th-century English “Censer and Incense Boat,” a gilt-copper and champlevé enamel “Reliquary Casket of St. Thomas Becket” (c. 1180-90), and the ivory holy water bucket “The Basilewsky Situla” (c. 980).

The compact, one-room show, on view in the entrance to the Robert Lehman Wing, just beyond the Met’s own Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, is divided loosely into two sections of medieval and Renaissance objects. The exhibit, however, is not an art history lesson about the connections between artists, periods, influences, or materials. Although it includes informative wall labels about the history and function of the objects, it is a free-form environment that can and should be treated as a lavish visual smorgasbord — a broad sampling of ravishing artworks in a variety of materials. The unassuming show comprises small objects — but it is a treasury of wonders.

One of the great strengths of this exhibition — unusual for the Met — is its compact size. The show, a collection of just a few glorious examples from nearly every major form of decorative arts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, focuses on the “Treasury Arts,” or precious liturgical and devotional objects. It acts as an unwitting emissary not only for the V&A but for the Met’s own spectacular collection. The curators have wisely provided just enough objects to spark visual connections and to whet your appetite. (Leaving the exhibition after the press preview, all I wanted to do was to head up to the Cloisters; and I had to stop myself from sneaking into the closed galleries of the Met’s amazing collection of carved ivories; and from immersing myself back in the Byzantine and the New Greek and Roman Galleries — collections this show made me hungry to re-explore.)

Every object in “Medieval and Renaissance Treasures” is a gem. Highlights include the painted and stained-glass window “Wild Man and Woman Supporting the Arms of Kyburg” (c. 1490), an animalistic and erotic depiction of a fur-covered Adam and Eve, and an early-16th-century (very late Gothic) German boxwood carving by Viet Stoss, a “Virgin and Child” devoted to the Woman of the Apocalypse. In one French ivory (c. 1320-30), the Christ child grows like a tree limb from out of the Virgin’s flowing, regal mantle, which opens like curtains on a stage. Donatello’s bronze sculpture “Winged Putto With Fantastic Fish” (c. 1386-1466), reminiscent of Maillol, is erotic and grand, as well as sleekly modern. Giovanni Pisano’s “Figure of the Crucified Christ” (c. 1300) is a carved ivory head and torso fragment of a corpora. In it, Christ’s head sinks, as his long locks of hair spread and settle like the wings of an alighting bird. His body is skeletal. His furrowed brow suggests sorrow. But his loincloth billows and rises, suggesting life through death, as it lifts his lower body skyward.

In this show I was inspired to revisit other works at the Met. The exhibition’s spectacular ivories, including “The Symmachi Panel” (c. 400), of a female priestess standing with an attendant next to an altar beneath an oak tree, made me long to see the Met’s Greek marble relief “Young Girl with Doves.” The ivory “Front Cover of the Lorsch Gospels” (c. 810), which depicts the Virgin and Child enthroned between St. John the Baptist and the prophet Zacharias, with its shallow, splayed-open figures, activated with linear curves and striations, reminded me of the Met’s illuminated manuscripts, as well as its own carved ivory book covers. So, too, did “The Soissons Diptych” (c. 1280-1300), an intricate Gothic work depicting the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. In this masterful French ivory, the narratives move frieze-like across three registers, and the sculptor utilizes the special, or more holy, upper areas inside the Gothic arches — in which we see the treetop from which Judas hanged himself, the pole to which Christ was tied during his flogging, Christ’s crucifix, his ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit.

But I was also inspired by this show to move forward in time. Among the exhibit’s ceramics is “Bowl With the Arms of Matthias Corvinus and Beatrix of Naples” (1476-90). The large bowl is one of two surviving pieces from the earliest-known set of ceramic tableware made in Italy for a foreign ruler (Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, and his wife Beatrix). At its center is a medallion depicting a landscape with seven nude children (one of whom climbs an orange tree) gathering and sorting fruit.

The scene, honoring marriage and hard work, symbolizes fertility and fruitfulness. But its roly-poly children — rotund, awkward, and sensual, shimmering blue and white along their taut contours and across tummy, buttock, and thigh — reminded me of the beautiful nudes in Cézanne’s “The Bathers” (1890), a small watercolor in the Met’s New Galleries for 19th- and Early 20th-Century Painting and Sculpture. In this 15th-century “Bowl,” we experience the fruits not only of the Renaissance but of Modernism; just as in Cézanne we experience the fruits of artists past. We are reminded that throughout history — with no disrespect to the likes of Charlemagne, Abbot Suger, or John Charles Robinson — the greatest custodians of art have always been the artists themselves.

Until August 17 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).