OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

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 “Stela of a polymorphic god” — 40 records examined, 28 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-03 23:16 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art: HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Altro spaccato per longo della stessa bottega, ove si vedonofra le aperture del vestibolo le immense piramide, from Diverse Maniere d'adornare i cammini, by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–1778

Altro spaccato per longo della stessa bottega, ove si vedonofra le aperture del vestibolo le immense piramide, from Diverse Maniere d'adornare i cammini

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Italian, 1720–1778 · 1769

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Buddhist stele

Buddhist stele

Artist not stated in the record · dated 511

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Buddhist stele

Buddhist stele

Artist not stated in the record · Dated 564 C. E.

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Plum Garden, Kamata (Kamata no Umezono) From the Series One hundred Views of Edo, by Ando Hiroshige, Japanese, 1797–1858

Plum Garden, Kamata (Kamata no Umezono) From the Series One hundred Views of Edo

Ando Hiroshige, Japanese, 1797–1858 · 1857

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Polymorphic Sweat Bee

Polymorphic Sweat Bee

Artist not stated in the record · 1917

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Battle of the Sea Gods, right half

Battle of the Sea Gods, right half

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1475

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Sketch of a River God, by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Italian, 1727 – 1804

Sketch of a River God

Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Italian, 1727 – 1804 · ca. 1750

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Ornament Panel with a Double Cartouche Showing a River God, a Nymph, and a Fountain, by Pierre Edme Babel, French, 1720–1775

Ornament Panel with a Double Cartouche Showing a River God, a Nymph, and a Fountain

Pierre Edme Babel, French, 1720–1775 · 1743-1763

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
God the Father

God the Father

Artist not stated in the record · 1700–50

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Fragment of a garment with embroidered inscription

Fragment of a garment with embroidered inscription

Artist not stated in the record · 870–892

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Design for the Letter D of a Pictorial Alphabet: Dieu (God), by Victor Vincent Adam, French, 1801 – 1866

Design for the Letter D of a Pictorial Alphabet: Dieu (God)

Victor Vincent Adam, French, 1801 – 1866 · ca. 1830

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Fragment of a garment with embroidered inscription

Fragment of a garment with embroidered inscription

Artist not stated in the record · 908–932 AD

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
What was queried

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. HTTP 403 from collectionapi.metmuseum.org. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 3852861 matched · 40 examined · 28 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where metadata_usage.access === "CC0" and an image resource was published.12 shown

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-09-03 23:16 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.