Art - Ned Denny discovers strange new hoardings in the crypt of the Sir John Soane's Museum

Petty typography leads to petty queries, and mine concerns the exact pronunciation of "nvisible Museum". Are we to acknowledge that missing capital letter with a brief but meaningful pause, or should its absence be vocalised with the loud prefatory click of !Kung bushmen? Or should the vowel sound simply be added by the speaker, in the manner of Yahweh? It even manages to be grating on the page, winking at you smugly from behind its designer disappearing act. But then again, such minor irritations shouldn't be allowed to interfere with critical judgement. The nvisible Museum, Peter Fleissig's nomadic collection of contemporary art, is, after all, a fairly serious enterprise, albeit one without any of the obvious characteristics of a typical museum. Lacking both permanent home and bureaucratic structure, it functions, in the words of the catalogue, "with the admirable economy of a virus, coming to life only when it finds an appropriate host". The toe-curlingly absent "I" (or "eye") alludes, I guess, to this elusiveness, but it also gives a clue as to Fleissig's tastes - this is for the most part a strikingly unvisual collection, ministering far less to the eye than it does to the mind.

Having just made a four-year, 44,000-mile circuit of art venues across the globe, adapting itself each time to the "host" location, the collection has returned to London. It can be seen at "Sphere", a new exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum. This isn't, on the face of it, the ideal place for an itinerant museum to stop by. No 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, which Soane occupied from 1813 until his death in 1837, is jammed to the rafters with artefacts of every description. It barely feels capable of accommodating visitors, let alone someone else's hoardings. But the nvisible Museum treads lightly (too lightly, some might say), and, true to its name, has occupied Soane's house with a series of works that could easily be missed were you not looking for them. Take, for example, Tatsuo Miyajima's Opposite Harmony No 45408/No 100100 (1990), a pair of red and green LED units whose numbers flicker inconspicuously in a darkened alcove. Its presence is minimal, and it seems to make sense only in relation to the broken bits of ancient marble that crowd it in on all sides. On the one hand, you have pieces of man, beast and plant given the durability of rock, and on the other you have the red-and-green, digitised flux of two unimaginably large figures. The enduring power of blood and leaf that each appears, in its very different way, to intimate is endless.

The siting of Opposite Harmony is successful because it strikes sparks off its new surroundings, casting each in an unexpected light. Something similar happens downstairs in the crypt, which Soane the antiquarian intended should have an atmosphere akin to a burial chamber or catacomb. Here sits the Egyptian sarcophagus that he bought for £2,000 in 1824 (the British Museum had balked at the price), its sides a dense forest of signs and symbols that plot the soul's passage through the underworld. On the walls near by are stone torsos, death masks, fragments of gothic vegetation, ammonites, a virtual pantheon of the infernal regions. And then, in close proximity, you have Gregor Schneider's Haus ur Puff (aus Berlin) (1996), a video of a disco ball spinning in a bare cellar. Witness the descent of man - from an ancient civilisation dedicated to the fine art of dying, to a respectful if uncomprehending humanism, to a culture unable to conceive of an afterlife in anything but the crassest terms. I don't know if the juxtaposition is deliberate, but it sure as hell is cutting.

There is yet more foreboding upstairs, where Paul Morrison's Sphere (1998/99) hangs near Francis Danby's Scene From Shakespeare's "The Merchant Of Venice" (1827). Morrison's painting is dominated by the jagged silhouettes of vast black dandelions, while Danby's is pitched into almost total darkness by a crowd of malevolently looming trees. In fact, this is one of the only sitings where old and new meet on fairly equal terms. In too many instances (Schneider's video being the cruellest and most successful example), the modern pieces appear irredeemably trivial next to the jumbled enigmas of antiquity. This can just about work when there's some witty interplay going on, as when Marc Quinn's bread hands (Untitled 2002) are placed beneath the stone paws of ancient lions, but sometimes even this basic level of engagement is lacking. And it would have been good to see the work in the Next Door Gallery at No 14 also slotted into Soane's collection, as this gives the impression of having been included at the last minute. So, to return to the viral metaphor, not so much a soul-wrenching fever as a case of a sphinx with a head cold.

"Sphere: loans from nvisible museum" is at Sir John Soane's Museum, London WC2 (020 7405 2107), until 21 December

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