The Arkivism 250
The greatest public-domain artworks, ranked. Every work here is free to look at, download and use.
This is a cultural-consensus ranking of works Arkivism can actually serve — not “the greatest art of all time,” and not one person’s taste. Picasso’s Guernica and Dalí’s Persistence of Memory stay out because they are still in copyright. How the ranking works
How this list is ranked
Nobody at Arkivism sat down and ordered 250 paintings. The culture already did, in a form we can count. A work rises when more Wikipedia languages have written about it, with English Wikipedia attention over the past year used to break ties. An artist may appear at most six times, so van Gogh cannot eat the list.
Only public-domain works with a rights-proved file in Arkivism are eligible. That is the point: a ranked masterpiece you can actually use. The list will move when the method is rebuilt, and later when people can rate works. It is a starting point to argue with, not a verdict.
Search on Arkivism is unchanged. This page is a separate, editorial ranking.