This article examines the work of Antonin Raguenet (1839–1920), who directed from his studio in Paris between 1872 and 1914 a vast project of architectural taxonomy, the Matériaux et documents d’architecture et de sculpture. Though unique in its vast geographic scope and empiricist approach, Raguenet’s project remains relatively obscure in the current scholarship of art and architectural history. Published monthly in eight-page pamphlets totaling over five hundred serialised issues, the Matériaux et documents ultimately contained over fourteen thousand illustrations of ornaments collected from buildings, plazas, monuments, and cemeteries across the European continent.

Raguenet’s ornamental gaze moves seamlessly from Haussmann-era apartment buildings, to universal expositions in Paris and abroad, to the façades of Lavirotte, Schoellkopf, and Guimard, reflecting the production and reproduction of ornament literature during the period of the Belle Époque. The collecting and cataloguing of architecture elements into categories – windows, cartouche, doors, capitals, balconies, etc. – is aided by the maturation of print media, the passenger railroad industry, and the rise of photographic reproduction in the late nineteenth century. This reading of the Matériaux et documents will introduce its context, contents, and methodology, as well as the role of ornament in imagining and observing the emergence of a new ‘modern style’ at the end of the nineteenth century.