L'addestratore di tartarughe

Osman Hamdi Bey painted this in 1906, when the Ottoman Empire was old, indebted, and arguing endlessly about how to modernise. He was himself an insider, an archaeologist and museum director in Istanbul. The picture shows an elderly man in old religious dress, a ney flute in his hand, a small drum on his back, gazing down at four tortoises crawling across the floor of a mosque. He appears to be trying to train them. It is usually read as a quiet joke about reform, the patient man and the near-impossible task of getting a slow, ancient system to move at all. Hamdi first showed it in Paris under the plain title Man with Tortoises. In 2004 it sold for about three and a half million dollars, one of the highest prices ever paid for an Ottoman painting.