Croeseid vs painting.

The incumbent against the two Croeseids, both CC0. The coins are normalised on opaque area, not bounding box — a wide oval fills far less of its box than a compact one, which is why one read small before. Both now ink 46.0% of frame.

The three

Both Croeseids are CC0 — Met Open Access, no attribution, no share-alike, commercial use fine. Not because the coin is ancient (a photograph of a 3D object gets its own copyright however old the object is) but because the Met dedicated these plates. Archive them rather than hot-link: the dedication is the Met’s choice, not a property of the coin.

Lockup · 64px

Scale — the decision

The app rail is 22–24px. Everything above has to survive that or it needs a separate drawn mark for small sizes. Judge this row first — it has killed every candidate so far.

Reversed on ink

In the product

Bare, across grounds

All three are opaque, so none needs a light-ink variant on dark grounds. The painting is the only one carrying a frame, and the frame is why it fails on every ground but bone — that white mount reads as a sticker anywhere else.

What each one costs to actually use