This paper deals with the topic of the retrieval of document images focused on a specific application: the ornaments of the Hand-Press period. It presents an overview as a result of the work and the discussions undertaken by a workgroup on this subject. The paper starts by giving a general view about digital libraries of ornaments and associated retrieval problematics. Two main issues are underlined: content based image retrieval (CBIR) and image difference visualization. Several contributions are summarized, commented and compared. Conclusions and open problems arising from this overview are twofold: 1. contributions on CBIR miss scale-invariant methods and don't provide significative evaluation results. 2. robust registration is the open problem for visual comparison.