Charles V, king of France from 1364 to 1380, actively encouraged the study of classical antiquity. This leaf is the title page to a French translation of a first-century Latin work, Valerius Maximus' Factorum et dictorum memorabilium (Collection of Memorable Facts and Sayings). The four-part illustration above the two columns of text shows how the artists of Charles' circle imagined the ancient world.

The two lower panels illustrate episodes in the text, anecdotes about Roman religion. On the left, a young priestess kneels before an altar of Ceres, the Roman goddess of fertility, in an image that resembles scenes of Christian faithful kneeling before the Virgin Mary. In the lower right panel, where a Roman priest loses his cap and then his office, the cap is shaped like a bishop's miter, and the temple in the background has the distinctive architecture of a medieval church. In the upper two panels, the ancient past and medieval present are brought into closer comparison. On the left, the translator Simon de Hesdin presents his text to the seated Charles V. On the right, the seated figure is the Latin author Valerius Maximus, and the standing figure before him the Roman emperor Tiberius, to whom the Latin text is dedicated.

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