gondolier

But at the same time, he begins to warm to the people around him, whether it’s Milo, a member of the Navajo tribe who invites him to his nephew’s traditional dance performance, or Alessandro, a third-generation Venetian gondolier who, nearing retirement, is preparing to hand his boat down to his son.

“I told the gondolier to stop singing,” Rustioni said.

He relates on a personal level to a gondolier whose son will eventually take over his business.

He views the old-master wing as akin to a village, and over time he counts all the inhabitants: There are 8,496, scattered among 596 paintings, and they include “every little background cherub, bullfight spectator, and ant-sized gondolier,” he says in a footnote.

The collection was heavy on figurative works like Édouard Manet’s painterly snapshot of a paddling gondolier, “Le Grand Canal à Venise,” and David Hockney’s “The Conversation,” which depicts the curator Henry Geldzahler and the writer Raymond Foye engaged in a tense conversation.