Botticelli’s Primavera, which is one of the Renaissance’s most elaborately encrypted mythologies, is in the Uffizi in Florence. The Courtauld does not have a work of quite such stature but next month I will take a Courtauld mythology, crypt-analyse it and discuss the bigger picture as a tribute to those who worked at Bletchley Park and without whose achievements the war against Nazi Germany could well have been lost.

In the meantime can I invite you to undertake a small piece of cryptanalysis? If you go to SEARCH on this website and enter Botticelli you get four works. What do they mean, and how do they know?