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 “Head of a bearded man wearing a pointed cap, perhaps a so-called Persian rider” — 24 records examined, 1 dropped by the rights gate.
Archives queried 2026-08-27 12:30 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.

Head of a bearded man wearing a pointed cap, perhaps a so-called Persian rider
Artist not stated in the record · 525–332 BCE

A Hunting Scene
Piero di Cosimo (Piero di Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio) · ca. 1494–1500

Head of a Bearded Elder
Augustin Pajou · 1768

Portrait of a Woman
Quinten Massys · ca. 1520

Head of a Central Asian Figure in a Pointed Cap
Artist not stated in the record · 12th–early 13th century

Portrait of a Carthusian
Petrus Christus · 1446

Hermann von Wedigh III (died 1560)
Hans Holbein the Younger · 1532

The Penitence of Saint Jerome
Joachim Patinir · ca. 1515

Young Man Holding a Book
Master of the View of Saint Gudula · ca. 1480

Head of a Donor
Albert van Ouwater · ca. 1465–70

Head from a Figure with a Beaded Headdress
Artist not stated in the record · 12th–early 13th century

Cassone with painted front panel depicting the Conquest of Trebizond
Apollonio di Giovanni di Tomaso · after ca. 1461
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. 119 matched · 24 examined · 1 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 12:30 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.