Showing Alberto Giacometti's best-known works — "Walking Man," "Tall Standing Woman," and the "Woman of Venice" series — alongside the art of an ancient culture dating to 900 B.C. comes as a bit of a curatorial surprise. But that is just what the Pinacothèque is doing, in "Giacometti and the Etruscans," a new show of 30 sculptures by the Swiss artist and over 150 Etruscan objects that runs through January 8.

One work in particular provides an essential link between the ancient civilization and the modern existentialist work of Giacometti: "The Shadow of the Evening," a small bronze statue that probably dates to the Hellenistic period and depicts a very young man with a slender, elongated body, as if stretched upwards to the divine. It's an enigmatic figure — does it represent an offering, a person making an offering, or a god? The resemblance between this thin, intense, and fragile figure from so long ago and Giacometti's "Walking Man" is incredibly striking.

Giacometti saw the statue in Tuscany in the early 1960s and was fascinated by it — an interest that began when he visited an exhibition of Etruscan art at the Louvre in1955. The exhibition includes notes that Giacometti took on the Louvre show — scribbling on the catalogue, covering it with little sketches, and scattering drawings of warriors on the map of Etruria. Could Giacomettihave found some kind of ideal synthesis of humanity in this stripped-down, emaciated figure and the smiling, voluptuous bodies on the Etruscan tombs?

Pinacothèque director Marc Restellini, who has co-curated the exhibition with Claudia Zevi, said in a statement that the connections between Giacometti and Etruscan sculpture are not limited to "The Shadow of the Evening," which is being shown in Paris for the first time. "What counts is that, in the context of the return to antiquity advocated by the Surrealists, to whom he was linked, Giacometti encountered a world whose aesthetics seemed very close to him." This connection, then, allowed him to "strengthen, deepen, and develop his art."

Of course, it's clear that Giacometti's sculpture speaks of tensions that are specific to the 20th century — the struggles of humanity traumatized by war and the Holocaust. In this sense, it is quite distant from the ritual functions of the slender Etruscan statues. It seems even more distant from the comprehensive collection of Etruscan artifacts on display at the Pinacothèque, which has brought together crafted items, metalwork, funerary steles, and various religious objects. There are two different movements to be observed here: the development of an ancient civilization and the way that Giacometti absorbed this development into his artistic vision.

The second part of the exhibition places Etruscan statues from the Guarnacci Museum in Volterra, Italy — mostly figures making offerings — alongside Giacometti's compelling silhouettes, establishing a real dialogue between the two. Texts by Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were both close to Giacometti, shed light on his art and his contemporaries' interpretation of it. For Genet, Giacometti's work has a transcendent quality that connects it to antique statuary because he does not speak to his contemporaries or to future generations but to "the countless people of the dead." Genet relates that Giacometti once had the idea of sculpting a statue and burying it, but "not so that someone would discover it — or if so, only much later, when he and even the memory of his name would have disappeared." With his chiseled, almost fossilized figures, it seems as if Giacometti anticipates the notion of the archaeology of the present, which resonates with much of today's Conceptual art.

For Sartre, Giacometti's accomplishment is to have depicted emptiness. "For 500 years, paintings were filled to the bursting point... Giacometti started his paintings by expelling the world." The paintings shown at the Pinacothèque fit this description, such as a "Bust of a Man," which echoes the images on the Etruscan funerary jars displayed in the first part of the show. Like the figures on these jars, Giacometti's humans seem almost to be relics, beyond any particular era.