This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Mario César Romero was the son of a house painter and seamstress from Puerto Rico who grew up in a housing project next to where Lincoln Center and its cultural institutions would one day rise.

Though blessed with neither good health nor fortune, he always carried himself with a certain élan, holding forth on art history at the counter of a home-style Puerto Rican restaurant downstairs from his apartment in East Harlem.

“His life transcended the most astonishing challenges with dignity,” said Susana Torruella Leval, a friend who is on the Brooklyn Museum’s board of trustees. “He was truly a 19th century gentleman. I always thought of him as being in the court of some great king advising him on the arts.”