OpenTwo archives, queried live.
Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Bust of a Roman Emperor / Bust of a man of African descent” — 24 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 03:30 UTC · fetched live for this request
isPublicDomain field is true for this object.metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.Smithsonian Open Access: HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.
Bust of a Roman Emperor / Bust of a man of African descent
Artist not stated in the record · mid-16th century
Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula
Artist not stated in the record · 37–41 CE
Bronze portrait of a man
Artist not stated in the record · 1st half of 1st century CE
Marble bust of a man
Artist not stated in the record · mid-1st century CE
Sardonyx cameo portrait of the Emperor Augustus
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 41–54 CE
A Hypocrite and a Slanderer
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt · ca. 1770–83
Marble portrait bust of a man
Artist not stated in the record · mid–3rd century CE
Marble portrait bust of a man
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 110–120 CE
Marble portrait of the emperor Caracalla
Artist not stated in the record · 212–217 CE
Marble portrait bust of a man
Artist not stated in the record · 81–96 CE
Marble portrait bust of a man
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 69–96 CE
Minnehaha
Edmonia Lewis · 1868
Where these records came from.
Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.
- The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field:
isPublicDomain. 186 matched · 24 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown - Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field:
content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-27 03:30 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.
Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.
An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.