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 “Sardonyx cameo of a double capricorn with a portrait of the emperor Augustus” — 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.

Sardonyx cameo of a double capricorn with a portrait of the emperor Augustus
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 27 BCE–14 CE

Sardonyx cameo portrait of the Emperor Augustus
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 41–54 CE

Emperor Charles V (1500–1558) and his Son Philip II of Spain (1527–1598)
Leone Leoni · 1550

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula
Artist not stated in the record · 37–41 CE

Bust of a Roman Emperor / Bust of a man of African descent
Artist not stated in the record · mid-16th century

Cameo with Hercules and the Nemean Lion within a Garland
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1220–40

Virgin and Child with Saint John the Baptist in front of a townscape
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1520–30

Sardonyx cameo fragment with Jupiter astride an eagle
Artist not stated in the record · 1st century BCE–1st century CE

Sardonyx cameo with a Bacchic group
Artist not stated in the record · 1st century BCE–1st century CE

Sardonyx cameo of Aurora driving her chariot
Artist not stated in the record · 1st century BCE–1st century CE

Cameo with the Archangel Michael
Artist not stated in the record · probably late 14th century

Marble portrait of the emperor Augustus
Artist not stated in the record · ca. 14–37 CE
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. 136 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.