Sort every artwork in the archive by the year it was made and a clear shape emerges. The collection has a centre of gravity — and it sits squarely in the 1800s. This timeline is built from the 180,156 works that carry a known date (of 193,155 in total), bucketed century by century from the 11th to the 21st.
- 180,156works with a known date
- 35.5%made in the 19th century
- 11th–21st cspan of dated works
- 2,753dated works before 1000 CE
The timeline
Read top to bottom, this is a thousand years of art-making in one column. Coverage is sparse through the medieval centuries, climbs steeply from the 1400s as the Renaissance arrives, and crests hard in the 19th century before falling away again after 1900. Each share is of the 180,156 dated works — not all 193,155 — and because the buckets are mutually exclusive, the shares add up to the whole.
| Rank | Century | Years | Dated works | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 11th century | 1000s | 93 | 0.1% |
| 2 | 12th century | 1100s | 393 | 0.2% |
| 3 | 13th century | 1200s | 506 | 0.3% |
| 4 | 14th century | 1300s | 995 | 0.6% |
| 5 | 15th century | 1400s | 4,828 | 2.7% |
| 6 | 16th century | 1500s | 15,695 | 8.7% |
| 7 | 17th century | 1600s | 30,000 | 16.7% |
| 8 | 18th century | 1700s | 22,995 | 12.8% |
| 9 | 19th century | 1800s | 63,957 | 35.5% |
| 10 | 20th century | 1900s | 35,080 | 19.5% |
| 11 | 21st century | 2000s | 2,861 | 1.6% |
A few thousand works reach back even further: roughly 2,753 dated works fall before 1000 CE, into the medieval and classical past. The exact figure is approximate — dating ancient objects is inherently fuzzy — so the chronological table above begins at the 11th century, where the count becomes firm.
The 19th-century peak
One century towers over the rest. The 19th century alone accounts for 63,957 dated works — 35.5% of everything with a known date, more than a third — making it the busiest hundred years on record. It is no accident. The 1800s were the great age of museum-building, and the era of Romanticism, Realism and Impressionism, when painting was produced — and collected — at unprecedented scale. The works that flowed into public collections then are exactly the works that are public domain now.
Why it stops at 1900
The steep drop after 1900 is a copyright effect, not an artistic one. This is a public-domain archive: a work appears here only once it has aged out of copyright. The 20th-century figure is therefore mostly early-1900s works whose protection has lapsed, and the 21st-century sliver is rarer still — overwhelmingly photographs of objects or works released openly. The art of the last hundred-odd years exists in abundance; it simply has not yet crossed the public-domain horizon. Read the timeline as a map of what is free, not of what was made.
By named period
Centuries are tidy because they are arbitrary; the periods art historians actually use are not. The named periods below are how the archive tags works by historical movement — but unlike the centuries above, they overlap. The Renaissance, Baroque and the broad Early-Modern era share boundaries and double-count the same works, so these counts do not sum to a whole the way the centuries do. Treat them as overlapping lenses on the same thousand years.
| Rank | Period | Years | Works |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Early 19th Century | 1801–1850 | 31,249 |
| 2 | Baroque | 1590–1750 | 27,995 |
| 3 | Late 19th Century | 1851–1900 | 27,542 |
| 4 | 18th Century | 1701–1800 | 21,644 |
| 5 | Renaissance | 1400–1650 | 20,458 |
| 6 | Early Modern | 1400–1800 | 18,429 |
| 7 | Contemporary | 1945–present | 12,975 |
| 8 | Classical Antiquity | -1199–500 | 12,249 |
| 9 | Medieval | 500–1400 | 1,994 |
| 10 | Ancient | -3500–500 | 22 |
The archive is not a neutral sample of all art ever made — it is a portrait of the 19th century and its neighbours, drawn by what museums collected and what copyright has since released. The centre of gravity sits in the 1800s, and every figure here links straight into the works themselves.
Keep exploring: browse art by historical period, trace the movements that defined each era, or read the full collection by the numbers.
How this was counted
Every figure on this page is computed directly from the Artifact World Gallery
corpus (build 2026-06-19T05Z-d430bcd5b96b) — not estimated. The
archive holds public-domain (CC0) artworks gathered from the open-access collections
of museums worldwide; counts are recomputed each time the collection is rebuilt, so
they reflect the archive as it stands today. Read our editorial
standards for how the collection is sourced and reviewed.
Frequently asked
- Which century is most represented in the collection?
- The 19th century, by a wide margin: more than 60,000 dated works — more than a third of everything with a known date — were created between 1800 and 1899.
- How far back does the collection go?
- A few thousand dated works predate 1000 CE, reaching back into classical antiquity, but the collection thins quickly before the Renaissance. Coverage climbs steeply from the 1400s onward.
- How many works in the archive have a known date?
- More than 180,000 of the 193,000+ works carry a canonical year of creation, which is what this century-by-century timeline is built from.