Closely held details of the couple’s daily life include flatware and an etched amethyst glass tea set. An Art Nouveau– influenced 1904 English-made table lamp and ashtray speak to influences from without. Books from Alexandra’s library include a 1912 edition of Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat inscribed “For my darling Alix, [from] Nicky.”

It is testimony, perhaps, to the clamor for vestiges of lost history that the late cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, like Malcolm Forbes, was a fan of Russian decorative arts and kept some Romanov family objects at Hillwood, her home-turned-museum in Washington, D.C. Hillwood lent to the show a 1913 Tercentenary brooch made in the Fabergé workshop of Albert Holmstrom, which also created the lily basket. The bauble, crusted with gold, aquamarines, rubies and diamonds, was presented in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Romanov rule in 1913.

The subplots about the sorts of objects that endure over dictators, wars, occupations and finally, glasnost are striking. For example, children’s toys occupy a large segment of the exhibition, perhaps because they were overlooked by ensuing rulers with bigger prerogatives than the playroom.

If “Nicholas & Alexandra” boasts a share of objects that invite viewers to read closely between the lines, one such example is the textile Alexandra commissioned in France in 1900: a Gobelin tapestry reproduction of Marie Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of Marie Antoinette and her children. Surely today the rulers’ shared fate imparts a dose of high irony to this roadshow of both domestic and precious objects.