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 “Via crucis - Station VIII, He Consoles the Weeping Women” — 40 records examined, 12 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-09-04 07:46 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.
Via crucis - Station VIII, He Consoles the Weeping Women

Via crucis - Station VIII, He Consoles the Weeping Women

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station III, He Falls Beneath the Cross the First Time

Via crucis - Station III, He Falls Beneath the Cross the First Time

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station VII, He Falls Beneath the Cross the Second Time

Via crucis - Station VII, He Falls Beneath the Cross the Second Time

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station IX, He Falls Beneath the Cross the Third Time

Via crucis - Station IX, He Falls Beneath the Cross the Third Time

Artist not stated in the record · 1748

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station II, He Takes the Cross on His Shoulders

Via crucis - Station II, He Takes the Cross on His Shoulders

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station IV, He Meets His Mother

Via crucis - Station IV, He Meets His Mother

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Frontispiece of the Via crucis (Stations of the Cross)

Frontispiece of the Via crucis (Stations of the Cross)

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station V, Simon of Cyrene Helps Him to Carry the Cross

Via crucis - Station V, Simon of Cyrene Helps Him to Carry the Cross

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station XIV, The Entombment

Via crucis - Station XIV, The Entombment

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station XI, Jesus Nailed to the Cross

Via crucis - Station XI, Jesus Nailed to the Cross

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station XIII, The Deposition

Via crucis - Station XIII, The Deposition

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian
Via crucis - Station XII, The Crucifixion

Via crucis - Station XII, The Crucifixion

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 1749

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. The archive returned no records for this term.0 matched
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. 1278890 matched · 40 examined · 12 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 2026-09-04 07:46 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.