The Salander-O’Reilly Galleries have done it again. Two years ago they exhibited Bernini’s terracotta masterpiece “Modello for Fountain of the Moor” (1653), a maquette for Bernini’s fountain at the southern end of the Piazza Navona in Rome. Now they have brought us two more Berninis, an early self-portrait in oil (c. 1616) that feels as modern and fresh as a work by Courbet, and a late marble portrait bust, possibly the artist’s last, “Portrait of a Gentleman” (c. 1670). The two Berninis complement the beautiful concurrent exhibition, “Italian Renaissance Sculpture.”

The white marble sculpture “Portrait of a Gentleman,” which shares the ground-floor space with the “Self-Portrait,” is afforded pride of place at Salander. Spot-lit and surrounded by red velvet ropes and stanchions, it glows in the darkened gallery like a vision. I do not know if it was merely because it was raining, but when I saw the work a green carpet led directly from the front door to the sculpture. This gave the experience the quality of an audience with royalty.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), whose ecstatic saints and angels billow and fly, not as if they were blown by the wind but as it they were the source of the wind itself, was the epitome of the dynamic, electrifying energy of the Baroque. Bernini imbued divine subjects with a dreamy, decadent, and erotic power. Yet his figures convey the very heart of classicism – a classicism afire.

Bernini was equally as innovative with the portrait bust, which he brought to a newly heightened level of emotional realism. “Portrait of a Gentleman” is more reserved than many of his portraits, yet no less a symphonic tour de force. The figure, who may be Francesco Bracciolini, the poet and friend of the artist, is dressed in an open cloak that gracefully sweeps and races around his broad shoulders. Bernini builds him like architecture. The nose and mustache overhang the mouth, which in turns suppresses a smile. His head is turned to his right with a haughty air of indifference, but his torso lifts and spreads invitingly, like an eagle settling on a perch. He welcomes us with the utmost decorum.

Engaging directly with the subject’s open eyes, which bulge to the breaking point, is not an easy task. Everything unfurls from his twisted brow. Feelings flash across his face like passing shadows. And he is forever on the verge of speaking. Fully alert and boldly realized, he is constantly in motion and looking away from you.

This ability to shift and to slyly keep one step ahead of your gaze gives the figure a restrained dignity and distance, an active inwardness that offsets the sculpture’s solid majesty and grand manner. Yet it also allows viewers to relax and to be in awe; to take in his towering superiority free of judgment and intimidation.

“Modello for Fountain of the Moor” was acquired by Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum in 2003. I can only imagine why New York’s museum directors let it go to Texas. Maybe they surmised that, with three Bernini sculptures already in New York public collections (two in the Metropolitan, one in the Frick), there is enough Bernini to go around. Possibly they spent the last of their acquisition dollars on an Anselm Kiefer, Kiki Smith, or Thomas Struth.

Whatever the reasons, let’s just call “Modello for the Fountain of the Moor” “the one that got away,” and hope that Bernini’s miraculous “Portrait of a Gentleman” does not leave museum mile.

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All of the 92 works from 60 artists in the survey show “Cast and Carved: American Sculpture 1850-1950” are distinctly American. The two-floored exhibition offers a variety of works, both figurative and abstract, in marble, wood, stone, bronze, and mixed media, that represent the best and the worst popular art of the period.

The sculptures run the gamut from academic, melodramatic, nationalistic, Victorian, or sentimental, on the one hand, to neoclassical, streamlined, or modern, on the other. Yet all, regardless of quality (and there are masterpieces and pure kitsch), are oddly related by a particularly American, can-do sensibility. This exhibition demonstrates that sculpture in this country changed and varied tremendously between mid-19th and mid-20th century, but that it has always represented some aspect of American culture, myth, or belief.

American sculpture early on was dependent on European neoclassicism, as represented in this show in works by Thomas Crawford, whose “Hunter’s Horn (or Boy and dog)” (1854) is on view, and by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose marble “Amor Caritas, The Maria Mitchell Memorial, (Angel of Purity)” (1902) opens the show. Most often, it seems, American sculptors followed the naive belief that more detail leads to better art. This is evident in sculptures such as Carl Ethan Akeley’s “The Old Man of Mikeno” (1923), a realistic bronze bust of a gorilla, and in the abundant American art on view, including Herny Merwin Shrady’s “Elk Buffalo: Monarch of the Plains” (1901).

A variety of motifs, subjects, and scale clash in the crowded exhibition. Overwrought cowboys (galloping, breaking bucking broncos, or watering their horses) and Indians (charging, scouting, or standing proud – appealing to the great spirit) by artists such as Frederic Remington, Charles Schreyvogel, Cyrus E. Dallin, Alexander Phimister Proctor, and Charles Marion Russell, fill one gallery. In adjacent galleries are putti, tritons, a Greek athlete, and Paul Manship’s “Europa and the Bull” (1924); romping elephants and bears; and a grouping of modern works by Elie Nadelman, Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Archipenko, and Gaston Lachaise.

Yet the best American sculpture in “Cast and Carved” reflect the disparate, crazy-quilt nature of America itself. They are works that retain their connections to their European traditions, and transcend, rather than mimic, those traditions – creating entirely new, daringly American works of art. Elie Nadelman’s “High Kicker (Dancer)” (1920) and “Horse” (1914) were modeled after such influences as Hellenistic Greek sculpture, American folk art, and Seurat’s figures. Isamu Noguchi’s “Lunar Landscape” (1943) was inspired by Calder’s mobiles, Arp’s abstractions, children’s games, and the surface of the moon.

The works by both of these artists strike us first as great works of sculpture that also happen to speak uniquely to us as Americans. In the lesser works in the show, it is their relentless nationalism, their “Americanness,” in subject and handling, which, though it draws us and may hold us, acts as a barrier to any greater experience.

“Italian Renaissance Sculpture” until January 8; “Bernini’s Last Portrait Bust” until February 5, 2005 (20 E. 79th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-879-6606). Prices: The gallery declined to disclose its prices.

“Cast and Carved” until December 17 (24 E. 78th Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues, 212-628-9760). Prices: $4,000-$5,000,000.