Xterm itself is a VTxxx emulator – the "xterm" protocol is a superset of VT102/VT220 in the first place, with some features from VT320/VT420/VT520, and of course some entirely new to Xterm itself. So you could set TERM=vt110
and the programs would work.
(Xterm also supports Tektronix 4014 emulation, but that's not really common.)
The VT52 protocol is a bit different, but even though GNOME Terminal (i.e. libvte) can't understand it, the real Xterm can. It should be enough to run xterm -ti vt52
to activate this.
URxvt (rxvt-unicode) should also support VT52, though I'm not sure how it's enabled (perhaps it's on by default); try urxvt -tn vt52
.