If you want a pretty picture, just visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has put online 492,000 high-resolution images of artistic works. Even better, the museum has placed the vast majority of these images into the public domain, meaning they can be downloaded directly from the museum’s website for non-commercial use. When you browse the Met collection and find an image that you fancy, just look at the lower left-hand side of the image. If you see an “OA” icon and the words “public domain” (as shown in the example below), you’re free to use the image, provided that you abide by the Met’s terms.
Also, the British Museum has made 1.9 million images available.
Classy, not cheesy.
Moche spider from the 6th-7th century
Nice. Very metal. Copper specifically at a guess.
Also a spider that’s not a fizzy creamy cold drink ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_cream_float) despite very nearly being an alternative name for a coffee variety.. (Mocha)
The Open Culture article has a rather major error implying this is less useful than it is. As seen in the quoted text they say “for non-commercial use”.
https://www.openculture.com/2024/11/the-metropolitan-museum-of-art-puts-490000-high-res-images-online.html
The Met’s Open access page disagrees, they assigned CC0 actual public domain, that means anyone can do anything even for commercial purposes.
https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/policies-and-documents/open-access
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
Thank you for something sane and interesting.
Not AI, but a data windfall for AI.
Ooh, this is very exciting. They have a lot of medieval European weapons, so being able to see photos is exciting because as an Australian i can’t get over there to look at them in person
A lot of museums have put a large number of images of items in their collections online. Note also many of these items are not on display in the museum galleries (limited space).
The Victoria and Albert has several drawings by Beatrix Potter (Peter Rabbit) of spiders. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1375273/male-crab-spider-watercolour-beatrix-potter/
They also have a copy of ‘Aranei: or, Natural history of spiders’ by Carl Clerck, London: Martyn’s Academy for Illustrating and Painting Natural History, 1793 though only a few plates online