For a while now an object of interest for scholarship has been the double evolution of art history at the end of the 19th century, with its institutionalisation as a discipline and the racialization of the discourse of some of tis practitioners. If it has been possible to analyse the consequences of this evolution on the intellectual development of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, more attention focused on the relationship between text and image in his illustrated work from 1876, Habitations of Man in All Ages, can lead to questioning the equivalence between seeing and knowing which runs through the architect’s work. Where the rhetoric of race requires maximum simplification for the demonstration of the Gobinian thesis this work diffuses, the visual aspects of the work, on the other hand, deliver quantity of data “superfluous” from the point of view of the demonstration’s needs.