Pera Museum

At the Pera Museum in Istanbul, the guide centers on a strange 1906 self-portrait by Osman Hamdi Bey, the reformer who founded Istanbul's Archaeological Museums and its first Academy of Fine Arts, showing himself as a tortoise trainer, flute in hand, surrounded by tortoises ignoring him. It traces the competing readings of the painting, from a satire of a slow-moving empire to historian Edhem Eldem's discovery of an unlikely visual source in a French travel magazine. Stand close and look for what the tortoises are actually doing.