Two 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 “Fitting in the form of a leaping lion” — 24 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-09-08 15:16 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.

Lion
Artist not stated in the record · after 1200

Foundation peg in the form of the forepart of a lion
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2200–2100 BCE

Sallet in the Shape of a Lion's Head
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1475–80

Vaikuntha Vishnu
Artist not stated in the record · last quarter of the 8th century

Handle of a Cosmetic Spoon in the Form of a Leopard
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1386–1347 BCE

Aquamanile in the Form of Samson and the Lion
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1380–1400

Aquamanile in the Form of a Mounted Knight
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1250

The Belles Heures of Jean de France, duc de Berry
The Limbourg Brothers · 1405–1408/1409

The Triumph of Fame; (reverse) Impresa of the Medici Family and Arms of the Medici and Tornabuoni Families
Giovanni di ser Giovanni Guidi (called Scheggia) · ca. 1449

Aquamanile in the Form of a Crowned Centaur Fighting a Dragon
Artist not stated in the record · 1200–1225

Virgil's Tomb by Moonlight, with Silius Italicus Declaiming
Joseph Wright (Wright of Derby) · 1779

Portal from the Church of San Leonardo al Frigido
Biduinus · ca. 1175
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. 1769 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 2026-09-08 15:16 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.