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This manuscript is written on parchment, in red and gold ink. Written in Latin, it contains the Eclogues, the Georgics and The Aeneid by Publius Vergilius Maro (Virgil, 70-19 B.C.). Out of the original 42 miniatures 19 have survived. Most of the miniatures occupy an entire page, and are in the pastoral tradition familiar from so many literary and visual works of antiquity.
In contrast to works dating from the late classical period, these images do not aspire to create any illusion of spatial depth. For this reason it had been conjectured that the manuscript is the work of a workshop in the Roman provinces, perhaps in Rome itself but more probably in the eastern Mediterranean.
Folio 14 recto shows the poet Virgil seated. Like the other miniatures, it suggests a transitional point, at which the classical realism of late antiquity is being abandoned and the flatter, more abstract forms of the Middle Ages adopted.
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