Civilization seems to have its own enormous bell curve. If you go back a few hundred years, everything looks old, quaint, dated. The aesthetic of those times immediately tells you that people were looking at the world in quite a different way from you. However, if you keep the pedal of your time machine pressed firmly to the floor, you'll eventually reach epochs, thousands of years ago, where things start to take on a more familiar, even modern, look. The ruins of Stonehenge, if they weren't so famous, could be mistaken for modernist sculpture -- especially from the 1970s Japanese mono-ha movement -- while the fashions of ancient Egypt make more sense in today's world of haute couture than do the powdered periwigs of the American Revolution.

The same feels true for the art of the Etruscans, an obscure race with an urban society on the Italian peninsula that predated and heavily influenced the Romans, before being conquered and absorbed by them. As the earliest recorded indigenous Italian civilization, it is fitting that "Il Mondo Degli Etruschi (The World of the Etruscans)," an exhibition of its artifacts -- like the anthropomorphic and Picassoesque Female Canopic Jar (late 7th century B.C.) -- should mark the occasion of the first major exhibition at the impressive new headquarters of the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo's downtown Kudanshita district.

"Some aspects of Etruscan art are very modern," the institute's director Alberto di Mauro observes, while pointing out three Small Warrior Statues (ca. 550 B.C.). "Even with these soldier statues, we see clear affinities with the stylization of modern sculptors like Alberto Giacometti or Marino Marini."