12:07 P.M. Takes a shortcut up a back stairway to the new 19th-century galleries, where the assistant curator Kathryn Calley Galitz and the exhibition designer Michael Langley are looking at wall colors for “Turner.” (Paint is being donated by Farrow & Ball, a British company specializing in historically accurate hues.) The Met’s Turners are all out on loan, so the two hold the enormous swatches next to a Constable landscape instead. Picture Gallery Red is chosen for the room devoted to Turner’s Venetian paintings; Mouse’s Back, a dull brown, will set off his late experiments with abstraction. “Paintings tend to become muted with time,” says Tinterow. “You want a wall color that looks a bit tired so that the paintings appear fresh.”

12:25 P.M. Pauses to show off a recent acquisition, a small and luminous late Delacroix, Ovid Among the Scythians, purchased by trustee Jayne Wrightsman in honor of de Montebello. Erudite chatter with a journalist in the galleries, resurrecting forgotten rivalries among 19th-century Salon painters.

12:40 P.M. Back in the office, looks over paperwork concerning proposed loans, gifts and deaccessions. Responds to an e-mail regarding the deaccession of a 19th-century British painting, sold at auction for $6,000.

12:50 P.M. Darts into the hallway, where he approves a press invitation and a poster for “Jeff Koons on the Roof.”

1:00 P.M. Lunches on seared tuna in the trustees dining room with Toto Bergamo Rossi, the aristocratic Venetian art restorer and stalwart of the organization Venetian Heritage, a benefit for which Tinterow attended the previous evening. Bergamo Rossi is proposing a loan exhibition of bronzes by the late-Renaissance master Tiziano Aspetti from the Chapel of St. Anthony, in Padua, soon to close for an extended renovation. While fleshing out the particulars, the two men recall their first meeting, at a mutual friend’s summer home on the Croatian island of Lopud, where Bergamo Rossi is now restoring a 15th-century stone house. Nightlife in Lopud, Tinterow says, involves “listening to the local donkey raid the garden.”<

1:40 P.M. Ian Wardropper, the chair of the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, joins them over coffee to discuss further details, including scheduling.

2:00 P.M. E-mails in the office: more Koons.

2:20 P.M. Tours the galleries devoted to 19th-century landscape painting with Alice Goldet, an American collector living in Europe, and her friend the French writer Olivier Bourgeois. Discussion of donors “Gene” (Eugene Thaw) and Wheelock Whitney III: when and how their collections were built and the merits of plein air sketches versus finished canvases. Tinterow calls Caspar David Friedrich “not a great painter but a great image maker.”

3:00 P.M. Meets in his office with a young woman who has recently moved to New York from London and is seeking a curatorial position. Tinterow asks about her work experience and in response to her queries, traces his own trajectory from his days as a student assistant at Brandeis’s Rose Art Museum, through his hesitating between law school and Harvard art history, to his first show, of Picasso’s drawings at the Fogg, timed to coincide with the artist’s centenary.

4:00 P.M. Museumwide conference of department heads with de Montebello regarding performance reviews for curatorial staff.

4:50 P.M. Steals an hour to edit his just-completed catalogue essay on Francis Bacon’s critical reception in America before “all hell breaks loose on Monday” with the Koons installation.

5:45 P.M. Meets with two of the Met’s “friends” groups—donors to particular areas of the museum—at the Guggenheim to tour a survey of Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist best known for his use of gunpowder in drawings and installations. Leisurely progress up the ramp of the rotunda chatting with the Met trustees Cynthia Polsky and Marie Douglas-David. Tinterow curated an exhibition of Cai’s work two years ago on the roof of the Met during which the artist set off daily explosions. “The first day, along Fifth Avenue, the nannies ran for cover with the children,” he says. “But people got used to it.”