On his many travels Ruskin visited religious monuments, including cathedrals. The list would be long, either by mentioning his visits in his Diaries or by describing and analyzing monuments in his works on architecture. His interest became passionate about Gothic cathedrals, and sometimes very critical for other periods. My presentation will focus on a hermeneutics of styles and mainly the Gothic style in Ruskin’s work. Through this process, I will seek to understand his positions on the question of restoration, and I will once again open the file on the discussions he is initiating on Viollet-le-Duc’s work: “Let us not talk about restoration, it is a lie from one end to the other”, he wrote in The Seven Lamps of Architecture.