Can You Crack These Medieval Codes?

You probably don’t need an explanation to understand what a green light at an intersection signifies or what it means when someone texts you a heart emoji.

Traffic signals and smartphones didn’t exist in the Middle Ages, but even then, the world was peppered with symbols and signs. Illuminated manuscripts were filled with lettering, pictures, and designs that viewers would have had to decode in order to understand both the text and accompanying illustrations.

The Getty Museum’s new exhibition, Symbols and Signs: Decoding Medieval Manuscripts, explores the sometimes mysterious, often playful world of medieval codes. The exhibition highlights examples of emblems, ciphers, and secret messages found in manuscripts from the 9th through 16th centuries and reveals what they meant to their readers.

Manuscript scribes employed codes to express complex thoughts, indicate hierarchies, represent abstract concepts like music and time, and make the document more playful and engaging for the reader. These ranged from inside jokes only the manuscript’s patron would have known; to puzzles, such as words that wind around crosses; to symbols that most readers of the time would have understood, like an ox representing Saint Luke the Evangelist.

“We wanted to use this opportunity to teach audiences that codes are not necessarily mysterious, but they are specific to the time,” says Orsolya Mednyanszky, assistant curator of manuscripts and cocurator of the exhibition.

Want to try your hand at deciphering some medieval symbols? Below, check out selected pages from a manuscript featured in the exhibition known as the Mira calligraphiae monumenta, which was written in 1561–62 by Georg Bocskay to demonstrate his technical prowess in various calligraphic styles. It was illustrated 30 years later by Joris Hoefnagel, who added fruit, flowers, and insects to nearly every folio. Hidden in each of the following leaves is at least one code.

Don’t feel too bad if you can’t figure them out. As Mednyanszky indicates, these emblems were based on cultural references of the 16th century, just like the symbols you know today that reflect our 21st-century world. And that’s really the point of the exhibition, says Elizabeth Morrison, senior curator of manuscripts and cocurator of the exhibition. “I hope that this show makes people more aware of the visual culture around them in the world,” she says. “So the next time they’re texting the laughing emoji to their friends, they’ll think, ‘Look, I’m using a code.’”

See if you can guess the signs in the pages below, then check out the exhibition to see more examples from a range of manuscripts.

Lots of letters

Can you guess what these stacks of letters mean? Each roundel contains the superimposed letters of the name of a famous woman of ancient Rome. From left to right and top to bottom, they are: Faustina, Lucretia, Virginia, Vittoria, Giulia, and Flaminia. Look closely, and you can also find a clue: around each roundel, you can see the name spelled out in smaller letters.

A puzzling script

What is the significance of the curly vine-like motif swirling around the text? If this one stumps you, here’s a hint: the design represents a disease that was common in the 16th century.

The speckled appearance of this script signifies leprosy, a topic discussed in the text itself (a quotation from Augustine’s commentary on the Gospels delves into the spiritual aspects of the illness). The speckles are meant to evoke the pale or pink patches of skin that characterize leprosy, while the spots on the butterfly’s wing and the rounded peas in the pods also mimic the black dots in the text.

Word search

You can probably figure out that the central maze is formed with words, actually a series of prayers. But can you find Georg Bocskay’s name (in the text as Georgius Bochkay) within the maze? (See top center.)

Decode the diagram

What religious symbols do you see on this page? There are lots of motifs tucked within these diagrams. At the top of the page, the XPS (chi-rho-sigma) monogram for “Christus” in the blue medallion suggests the dominion of Christ over the world, signified by the maps of the continents (maps themselves are a kind of code representing a flattened version of the globe). Echoing the idea of spiritual authority over the earthly realm, at the bottom of the page Hoefnagel included a verse from Psalm 57: “Exaltare super caelos Deus et in omnem terram gloria tua” (Be exalted above the heavens, God, and your glory through all the earth).

In addition, the two columns suggest the so-called Pillars of Hercules (based on promontories that flank the Strait of Gibraltar), which served as imperial symbols for the Habsburg dynasty.

What's in a name?

Can you spot the hidden nods to Hoefnagel himself? On this page (which serves as a guide for how to combine ffi into a single character), Hoefnagel had some fun with his own name and tools of his craft. At the bottom, the horseshoe (hufeisen) and nail (nagel) stand for Hoefnagel. The gold G that curls around the nail is the initial of his first name, Georg (in German). The emblem is surrounded by artists’ supplies such as brushes, a square, a compass, and a stylus.

Want to learn some more medieval codes? Check out Symbols and Signs: Decoding Medieval Manuscripts, on view at the Getty Center until August 10, 2025.