Abstract
The article focuses on the database Lyon16ci which collects illustrations printed in Lyon during the Renaissance period, an on-going project resulting from the cooperation between the Visual Geometry Group in Oxford and the project “The Illustrated Book in Lyon 1480-1600” (CNRS/VeDPH). It explains how this automatic image retrieval works and its usefulness in answering questions about the reuse of Renaissance printed illustrations and about iconographic trends in sixteenth century French images.