The manuscript belongs to the two book version and is illustrated with brilliantly coloured, extraordinarily lifelike, accurate and minute images of birds, their attendants, and the instruments of the art. This manuscript contains additions made by Manfred, which are all clearly marked in the beginning by notations such as "Rex", "Rex Manfredus" or "addidit Rex". A 1596 Latin edition was published in Augsburg by Marcus Welser and reprinted in Leipzig in 1788–89 with commentary by the naturalist Johann Gottlob Schneider. The first translation of this work was into French and was commissioned around 1300 by Jean II, Lord of Dampierre. The first translation into English (of the six-book version) was by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, as "The Art of Falconry by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen" which was published in 1943. This work is notable for the fact that Frederick II mainly confides in his own observations and experiments: he experimented with eggs to see if they would hatch only by the warmth of the sun; he tried to find out if birds used their sense of smell while hunting by covering the eyes of vultures. The author keeps to his intention, formulated in the preface, to describe the things as they are (“que sunt, sicut sunt”). It is a scientific book, approaching the subject from Aristotle, whom he likes to contradict. At the same time it is a scholastic book, minute and almost mechanical in its divisions and subdivisions. Frederick II was familiar with Aristotle's treatises on animals in Latin translation: "Liber Animalum", a translation by Michael Scot (1175 – c. 1232) from the Arabic translation "Kitāb al-Hayawān". He was also familiar with "De Scientia Venandi per Aves", a treatise by the Arab falconer Moamyn which was translated into Latin at his court by Master Theodore of Antioch, and much copied. The Vatican edition includes illuminations and has nearly 900 images of birds. It also includes figures of Frederick in a Byzantine pose and another, possibly of Manfred. While the historian Charles Haskins wrote approvingly of the bird illustrations and their lifelike appearance, the zoologist William Yapp found them largely inaccurate.