After the Statue of Liberty, perhaps the most famous public sculpture in New York is Rockefeller Center’s Prometheus, who adorns the Lower Plaza. Prometheus, bearer of fire from gods to man, fell afoul of Zeus and was condemned to an eternity of having his liver plucked at by birds. The sculpture has also received some plucks.

As Dianne Durante wisely notes in her new book, “Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan,” it’s really, really hard to do a statue of a man flying — especially when he doesn’t have wings. Consequently, Prometheus looks rather as though he is doing the sidestroke. Or, as he apparently struck some observers in the 1930s, when the sculpture was installed, as though he is not so much flying as falling — perhaps from high in the RCA Building. Did New Yorkers really used to call him “Leaping Louie”? Even the sculptor, Paul Manship, was none too pleased with his own handiwork.

Yet, it is famous — and, dare I say, beloved. It’s not clear to me that any other statue would have suited that space as well as Prometheus does, or would have become the icon of New York that it has become. But Manship created much more than just Prometheus, as the Gerald Peters Gallery’s new show of his bronzes — together with works of sculptors in his circle (including Anna Hyatt Huntington, Walker Hancock, Manship’s teacher Charles Grafly, and Manship’s pupil Gaston Lachaise) — illustrates.

American bronze sculpture had been dominated for many years by the fluid naturalism of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Daniel Chester French, and Frederick MacMonnies were the major figures. The naturalism got so good that it engendered a backlash. We got the primitivist modernism of William Zorach, as well as the works of Manship, who is hard to pin down. To the traditionalists, he was a modernist. To the modernists, he was a traditionalist. Historians note that at a certain point in the modernist onslaught, academicians came to regard Manship as their standard bearer. But was it a Pyrrhic regard? Manship’s work was so stylized, drawn from an archaizing impulse that freed the sculptor from the old Beaux-Arts shackles. The extreme stylization of some of these pieces borders on abstraction, but the aesthetic impulse is very different from that of “abstract sculpture.”

Manship wasn’t a modernist. He was an archaist. He loved the early Greeks. If he was less than sanguine about his own Prometheus, it may be because he was afraid that it wouldn’t succeed in exactly the way it did succeed: as an image. He concentrated on line and mass, not on naturalistic detail. His sculptures were often meant to be taken in as a whole. The outlines are crisp, and the surfaces are very beautifully modeled, though not with a whole lot of content.

In New York we have, in addition to “Prometheus” (1934), several other public works by Manship. They range in date between 1917 and 1960, a period that saw many changes in modern art. Manship’s earliest public work in the city is the set of four bronze reliefs, “The Four Elements,” adorning the lower façade of 195 Broadway, one of the city’s most beautiful skyscrapers, between Fulton and Dey streets.

In 1946, Manship created the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Flagpole Base in Governor Smith Memorial Park at Catherine and Cherry streets at the Al Smith Houses. The flagpole base includes no image of the governor. (A bronze statue of Smith, by Charles Keck, stands nearby.) Instead, this is the sort of whimsical work in which Manship came to specialize. It features stylized animals (a bear, a beaver, an owl) that seem intended to appeal to children.

This and other works by Manship prefigure the whimsical bronzes of contemporary sculptors like Tom Otterness and Barry Flanagan. The flagpole base was commissioned by Robert Moses, who loved Manship’s work. Indeed, Manship’s sculpture, like that of the animalier Frederick George Richard Roth, is the perfect sculptural complement to the Moses aesthetic carried out by architects like Aymar Embury II, which used simplified traditional forms.

We see the same thing in what probably ranks as most people’s favorite among Manship’s New York works, the William Church Osborn Memorial Playground Gateway in Central Park, just south of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moms and kids coo over the bronze bears set atop a granite pedestal. The date is 1952, and the stylistic amalgam is mid-century Manhattan, a counterpoise to the International Style of the U.N. Secretariat and Lever House from the same period. In 1956 Moses had Manship design the three great medallions that ornamented the New York Coliseum, which stood where the Time Warner Center is today. Finally, Manship crafted the Lehman Zoo Gates at the Children’s Zoo in Central Park. Here, on the central pier, a boy dances with two goats, not Manship’s most felicitous image.

The Gerald Peters exhibit helps us to see Manship’s small bronzes, which often have a delicacy and sensuousness that helps us better to appreciate his exceptional technical skills. His works in the cityscape can sometimes charm with their whimsy, or present striking images suited to their settings, but in the last analysis they stand to the works of the Beaux-Arts period as Robert Moses’s planning sensibility stands to the City Beautiful.