In this article, we propose a method of characterization of pictures of old documents based on a texture approach. This characterization is carried out with the help of a multi- resolution study of the textures contained in the pictures of the document. So, by extracting five features linked to the frequencies and to the orientations in the different parts of a page, it is possible to extract and to compare elements of high semantic level without expressing any hypothesis about the physical or logical structure of the analysed documents. Experiments show the feasibility of the fulfillment of tools for the navigation or the indexation help. In these experi- mentations, we will lay the emphasis upon the pertinence of these texture features and the advances that they represent in terms of characterization of content of a deeply hetero- geneous corpus.