Pinax brings public-domain and openly licensed artworks from the world's museums into one place. Each work keeps its source institution, rights statement and link back to the museum's own catalogue record.
We wanted the visual relationships between historical artworks and objects to be easier to discover. We also wanted the artists, museums and historical context behind those works to remain visible, intact and linked to the source.
Pinax is intended for anyone doing visual research: artists, designers, students, academics, writers and the simply curious.
We humans are built for storytelling and visual artifacts. They survive because someone keeps them. They are important.
Images are refused otherwise, with everything logged.
Every work is public domain, CC0, or CC BY 4.0 at its source institution, with the license shown verbatim on each record. CC BY 4.0 works require attribution; the Copy attribution button gives you the line to use.
Some works are marked US-PD: their holding institution states no known United States copyright is known. Pinax admits these only when they predate 1900 as an additional safeguard. Reuse outside the United States is your responsibility to verify; the source rights statement is reproduced on each record.
The standard definitions are Creative Commons' own (creativecommons.org/cc-licenses).
This is a collection of historical art, and some works carry the prejudices of their time. Titles, inscriptions, and imagery given by their original creators may be offensive or graphic. They are held as documentation, not endorsement: the record of what was made, kept intact. Where a source institution has flagged such context, that context travels with the work.
Creative Commons licenses and CC0 dedications are irrevocable once granted; access is however not. APIs retire, institutions re-platform, change policy and endpoints move. Pinax therefore keeps the original file, the untouched source record, and the rigths statements together, preserving the evidence used to admit a work event if its original endpoint later changes.
It is not a substitute for the museums; every record links back to its source, and the museums' own scholarship is always the deeper resource. And it is also not a rights authority: the licenses shown are the museums' own statements, reproduced faithfully.
Pinax is built and maintained by Resistance Labs as a public visual research tool for the open cultural commons which went live 4th September 2026.
The project emerged from our interest in archives, provenance and visual discovery at Rebel Archive, but it operates as a separate public resource. Pinax indexes only openly licensed and public-domain works, preserves the source and rights record alongside each file, and always points back to the holding institution.
The term originates from the Ancient Greek πίναξ (pínax), meaning tablet or board. In the 3rd century BCE, the poet and scholar named Callimachus complied the Pinakes; a massive, 120-volume bibliographic catalogue associated with the Ancient Library of Alexandria. It organized authors and works into categories and became foundational to later bibliographical practice. The Romans later adapted the word into Latin, where the term evolved to describe a painted framed picture embedded within decorative mural walls, as famously seen in the ruins of Pompeii.
The mark begins with the Greek glyph for pi, drawn by hand on an old Wacom Intuos tablet and shaped with the geometry of a Japanese torii gate in mind. The wordmark πnax signs everything else. Spelled out, it is PINAX.
As a thought experiment, if we assume a standard ancient Greek text conversion where 1 character equals 1 byte, the Pinakes would be roughly 10 to 11 megabytes (MB). At its peak, the Library of Alexandria held an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 papyrus scrolls, perhaps 100,000 distinct works. As plain text that would hold about 40 to 45 gigabytes (GB) of raw data. But this accounts only for the words, not the artifacts that carried them. Scan those scrolls as high-resolution images to capture the texture, the ink, the artwork, and the decay, and the required storage skyrockets into petabytes, millions of gigabytes.
For modest comparison, the Pinax archive currently holds 722,599 works (1.84 TB originals), with a refusal log of 2,106,008 records in accordance with its three conditions.
Every record carries a Copy attribution button that produces this line ready to paste (artist, title, date, holding institution). Use the Copy license button the same way.
To cite the archive itself: with the latest index snapshot date shown in the footer.
The artwork images are freely accessible under their rigths statements, but the infrastructure, curation, refusal logs, and backend software used to organize, filter, and connect those pieces remain closed-source and proprietary aspects of Pinax. Write to us if you have questions.
Corrections, media, and institutional enquiries: info@pinax.art.
If you are a museum or hold a collection you believe belongs here, we would like to hear from you.