If you’re like me, you have a bemused family that doesn’t really know what you’re doing but wants to be supportive. This support can take the form of accompanying you to museums and galleries while travelling or at home. Eventually, despite their best efforts, they get bored and fail to hide their disinterest in seeing another statue, another mosaic, or another religious painting. I even get a bit exhausted from the religious paintings after a while. But I have strategies to keep my family engaged with the artwork and make the trip more interesting for them.

1. Ugliest baby wins
Art History is filled with babies that look utterly terrifying. I don’t like small children at the best of times but some of these children are reminiscent of the baby crawling on the ceiling in Trainspotting. So, the aim is to capture the souls of these evil critters in a photograph and then compare later to see who found the ugliest one.
N.B. You can only photograph the babies in the artwork, it’s against the rules to photograph any particularly ugly children that happen to be in the museum or gallery that day.

2. Funny Lions
I’m currently undertaking a research trip in Venice so the place abounds in lions. However, they are a recurrent theme in art so there won’t be any issues with your family or friends finding some odd-looking creatures. In this category, wonky cats and leopards are also acceptable.

3. Best Death
This is a fun one if you have a dark sense of humour. I am particularly fond of paintings of St Peter where he has a huge blade stuck in his head but only looks mildly annoyed. Find and photograph the best death (or miracle) of a Saint depicted in the artwork.

4. Sexy Saint Sebastians
This is the adults-only challenge. It’s a bit of a cliche that St Sebastian is generally depicted as hot and with the cloth covering his privates just about to slip off – much like Athena’s clothing in Hellenistic sculpture. So, to keep your museum-going family entertained, send them to find the hottest St Sebastian that they can among the plethora that inhabit any gallery with an okay-ish collection of Renaissance art. For bonus points, you can try to identify one of the lesser St Sebastians. The Correr Museum has one, you can find it for yourself.

There you go, four strategies (or missions) that you can keep your friends and family busy at the museum instead of asking when we are leaving, how long are you going to look at that one artwork, or don’t all those busts look the same?