Say “Renaissance sculpture” and the images that instantly spring to mind are Ghiberti’s golden “Gates of Paradise,” Donatello’s naturalistic nudes, and Michelangelo’s passionately energetic statues of Moses and David—all made by Tuscan artists for central Italian patrons. Since 1550, when Giorgio Vasari wrote the firstof all art histories, most accounts of the Renaissance emphasize the development of art in Florence and Rome. But when it comes to one of the key principles of the Renaissance—the recovery of ancient Greek and Roman subject matter and styles—sculptors north of the Apennine mountains went much further than their colleagues in central Italy, establishing a visual culture so rich in classical references that its like was not seen again until the Neoclassical period in the late 18th century.

This summer and fall, three exhibitions organized entirely independently from one another are showcasing Renaissance sculpture from northern Italy. Prompted by no particular anniversary date, this fortuitous coincidence demonstrates that scholarship and popular taste are finally catching up with one of the most amazing episodes in the history of sculpture.

When Donatello first arrived in Padua in 1444, an occasion that marks the beginning of Renaissance sculpture in northern Italy, the soil was well prepared. The fact that the pioneer of Renaissance sculpture in Florence was sought after by Paduan patrons can be explained by their shared antiquarian interests, fostered by the local university, which was a hotbed of classical literary learning. These studies also flourished at the nearby ducal residences in the Po valley. It was at the court of Leonello d’Este in Ferrara that Pisanello—as a painter a protagonist of the latest phase of the courtly Gothic style in Italy, but as a draftsman a fervent student of Roman antiquities—introduced the medal as a new artistic genre, in 1438. Inspired by ancient coins and a late Imperial precursory type not intended as coins but as collectibles, the medals of Pisanello and his followers celebrated contemporary rulers, often on the occasion of important events in their lives, such as marriages or diplomatic voyages.

The commemoration of a contemporary individual of exemplary virtue was also the raison d’être of Donatello’s bronze equestrian monument of the military leader Erasmo da Narni, better known as Gattamelata (a nickname of obscure origins meaning “the honeydew cat”). It was erected on Padua’s main civic square, the Piazza del Santo, in 1453, inspired by the urban setting of the ancient equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, which was next to the Basilica of St. John Lateran until Michelangelo moved it to the capitol in 1538. Underscoring the connection with ancient Rome, Gattamelata is shown in a suit of fantasy armor all’antica, without a helmet, so as to present his portrait head, which, with its austere facial expression and short, slightly disheveled hair recalls models from the period of the Roman republic.

Around the same time he was working on the Gattamelata monument, Donatello made a number of bronze figures and reliefs (1446–50) for the high altar of the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua, better known as the Santo. These are grouped around the central figure of the enthroned Virgin Mary in the guise of an ancient goddess. One of the younger assistants who helped Donatello with the modeling, casting, and chasing of these bronzes was Antonio di Chelino, a sculptor and goldsmith from Pisa. The Metropolitan Museum recently acquired a rare terracotta relief by this artist that shows the half-twins Hercules and Iphicles (who had the same mother, Alcmene, but were fathered by the god Zeus and the mortal Amphitryon at a day’s interval) with the snakes their mother’s suspicious husband sent. The infant demigod Hercules, whose head and left arm are missing here, pluckily strangled the serpents. The presence of the hero’s seldom-depicted half-brother in this scene might go back to an allegorical interpretation offered by the Florentine humanist Coluccio Salutati, according to which the two figures are personifications of the human body (Iphicles) and soul (Hercules). Nude infants became one of the most popular subjects of Renaissance sculpture, though they were hardly ever found in Medieval art. Many of them are winged and represent spiritelli, airy sprites suggestive of youthful energy and innocence.

The small bronze figure was another particularly successful genre that reappeared in the Renaissance after being abandoned in late antiquity. Like medals, they had the advantage of being easily transportable and were made from the beginning as collector’s objects. In fact, small bronzes formed the core of any Renaissance collection of artworks, and to this day, from the financial point of view alone, Renaissance bronzes are generally the most valued objects in any collection of Old Master sculpture. Bronze on a small scale was closely associated with classical antiquity, and all early works of this kind refer in some way to the glorious Mediterranean past—either by reproducing their subject matter from ancient mythology or history; by re-creating utilitarian object types known from Roman examples; or by directly copying famous sculptures in a miniature format. Not coincidentally, the earliest signed and dated small bronze is Filarete’s equestrian monument of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (1465), reduced to a height of 14½ inches.