Vaticanus is not a beautiful manuscript in the way the illuminated gospel books are beautiful. It is three columns of small, even Greek majuscule on parchment so fine it is often remarked on, with no illustration, no gold, and almost no decoration of any kind. The impression it gives is of a scriptorium that had money and used it on materials and accuracy rather than on display. For textual critics that plainness is the point: the book was made to be a reliable copy.
Centuries after it was written the ink had faded, and a later scribe went through the entire manuscript tracing over every letter. Where he judged a word to be wrong he left it untouched, and those skipped words are now among the most valuable things in the book, because they show the original hand exactly as it was, unretouched, beside the retouched text around them. A correction made by omission has preserved the evidence of what was corrected.
The codex is substantially complete but with real gaps. The beginning of Genesis is missing, part of the Psalms, and everything after Hebrews 9:14, which removes the Pastoral Epistles, Philemon and Revelation. Because the ending is lost, the manuscript cannot be asked whether it once contained Revelation, and that silence has been argued over for as long as the codex has been studied.