Yes, thank you BrianWK, that’s one of the many discussions I found in my searches.
Indeed there are many ways to “fake” the appearance I’m after, such as the one you mention. On my own site, in a fixed size rectangle, I’ve put an image in the lower left of a background div, then I simulated text wrapping by indenting the final lines of text in the foreground div.
But obviously this isn’t a good workaround for a liquid layout.
Apparently this is one of those rare examples of common layout scheme used in print that can’t be executed with css …