The plaque reads 77.4 × 51.3 cm, and I read it twice, because the real one — behind glass, behind a rope, behind several hundred phones — measures 77 × 53.
Two centimetres short on the width. Not a framer's error. A rule.
The 30-second answer
A hand-painted oil reproduction of the Mona Lisa costs $272 at 77 × 51 cm — within a centimetre of the Louvre panel — and $353 at 100 × 66 cm, shipping included. A giclée print at the same two sizes costs $68 and $87.
It's legal, because the painting entered the public domain roughly four centuries before copyright even existed as a concept. But the Louvre's own copyists cannot make you the same-scale version: museum rules require a copy made in the galleries to differ from the original by at least one fifth in size, and to carry the copyist's signature, never Leonardo's. Bureaucracy, it turns out, beats out lawyers here.
And here's the part that surprised me: the Mona Lisa is not the most-copied painting in the world. Across 2,595,509 hand-painted commissions placed between 2008 and 2026, it comes second. Van Gogh's The Starry Night out-orders it by 23%.
1. The original, in numbers
| Title | Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, La Joconde) |
| Artist | Leonardo da Vinci |
| Date | c. 1503–1519 |
| Support | Oil on poplar panel — not canvas |
| Dimensions | 77 × 53 cm (30.3 × 20.9 in) |
| Location | Musée du Louvre, Paris, behind protective glass |
| Louvre visitors, most recent full year | 8.7 million, over three-quarters from abroad |
| Museum's original design capacity | ~4 million/year — roughly half current traffic |
| Time a visitor gets at the front of the crowd | about 50 seconds (2019 survey) |
| Coming change | A dedicated room, separately ticketed, under the "Louvre New Renaissance" programme; new Seine-side entrance targeted for 2031 |
Sit with that 50-second figure for a second. The most-copied face in Western art is one that almost nobody has actually looked at for a full minute of their life.
2. What a reproduction costs, at two sizes
Reproduction size ladders are generated from the artwork's own aspect ratio — for this painting 1797 : 2711, i.e. 0.663 wide-to-tall — stepping surface area by 1.09 per rung, capped at 250 cm on the long side. Two rungs matter here.
Size A — the Louvre-scale copy: 77.4 × 51.3 cm (30.5 × 20.2 in)
| Line | Price |
|---|---|
| Hand-painted oil on canvas | $272 (≈ €235) |
| Giclée on canvas, same size, for comparison | $68 |
| + Gallery wrap, stretched and ready to hang | +$137 |
| + Outer moulding frame | +$237 to $311 |
| + Ornate gilt frame | +$387 to $470 |
| + Final varnish | +$15 |
| + Elite senior artist | +$100 |
| Typical framed total, mid-range frame | $524 |
Size B — the statement wall: 100.2 × 66.4 cm (39.4 × 26.1 in)
| Line | Price |
|---|---|
| Hand-painted oil on canvas | $353 (≈ €306) |
| Giclée on canvas, same size | $87 |
| + Gallery wrap | +$201 |
| + Outer moulding frame | +$351 to $460 |
| + Ornate gilt frame | +$563 to $671 |
| Typical framed total, mid-range frame | $758 |
Read the two together and the whole cost structure falls out like a magic trick explained. The canvas grew 68% in area and the painting price grew 30% — that's the sub-linear area exponent in the pricing formula doing its quiet work. But the frame price grew 47%, because framing cost is driven by perimeter and by volumetric shipping weight, both of which scale faster than a painter's hours ever do.
At large sizes, the frame is the expensive half of the order. Which is exactly why, across 2,595,509 hand-painted oil orders, only 33% included one.
3. The three questions buyers actually ask themselves
"Is it legal to have a copy of the Mona Lisa painted?"
Yes, entirely — and the interesting restrictions are the museum's, not the law's.
Leonardo died in 1519. The painting has sat in the public domain for centuries; no copyright subsists in it, and commissioning, selling, owning or hanging a hand-painted copy is unrestricted, same as it would be to hum a folk song from 1600. The same is true of every painting in the ranking in Section 4, all of which are by artists dead more than 70 years — which is exactly why 146,812 order lines for Dalí, Picasso, Magritte, Rothko, Chagall and Richter get excluded from that list entirely.
What is restricted is copying inside the Louvre itself. The museum has run a copyists' programme for centuries, and the rules are oddly specific, like a country club with an actual constitution:
- Artists apply online with a portfolio and a statement of which works they intend to copy.
- Successful applicants receive a three-month permit. Reported permit volumes vary by era — around 250 permits a year historically, roughly 90 artists on three-month permits more recently; approximately 150 copyists work at any given time, with a waiting list of about a year.
- Galleries are open to copyists 9:30 am to 1:30 pm, September to June, excluding Saturdays and holidays.
- The copy must differ from the original by at least one fifth in size.
- It must carry the contemporary artist's signature, never the master's.
- Finished work is inspected by museum officials before it leaves.
So the one thing the Louvre's own programme structurally cannot produce is Size A above — a same-scale Mona Lisa. A commercial atelier can, and does; that rung is the most-ordered Mona Lisa size in the ledger. Two centimetres of institutional honesty, and a whole category of demand living just outside it.
One thing to avoid regardless of legality: a reputable studio will not replicate the original's exact dimensions and craquelure and signature as a package deal. A copy is a legitimate, openly declared copy. Any vendor offering to make it indistinguishable is offering you something else, and you should walk away.
"Should I get the same size as the original?"
It's the most satisfying choice and the most commonly ordered one, but the aspect ratio matters more than the scale does.
Three things to weigh:
- Same-scale carries meaning no other size does. At 77 × 51 cm the head sits at the size Leonardo actually painted it, which is slightly under life. It reads as intimate rather than declarative — which is exactly why the Louvre display, at twenty metres and fifty seconds, misrepresents the painting so thoroughly.
- Bigger costs surprisingly little. +68% area for +30% price. If the wall is large, the bigger rung is better value per square centimetre than the smaller one.
- The frame decision dwarfs the size decision. Going from Size A to Size B adds $81 to the painting and $114-$201 to a frame. If budget is the constraint, take the bigger canvas and skip the frame — not the other way round.
For a masterpiece copy, keeping the original's aspect ratio matters more than matching its exact dimensions. The Mona Lisa is a tall, narrow 0.663 ratio; forced into a standard 4:5 canvas it loses the pillars and the parapet at the edges, which are half the composition's architecture and nobody tells you that until it's too late.
"Which painting should I actually have copied?"
Follow what a copy does better than a print, not what a museum ranks highest.
The ranking in Section 4 shows people converging, without anyone telling them to, on works where hand-painting is a genuine upgrade: heavy impasto, gold leaf, poured paint, thick colour fields — surfaces a print flattens into nothing, the way a photograph of a steak flattens the sizzle. A Klimt's gold and a Pollock's relief simply do not survive being printed; a Vermeer interior, more evenly toned, survives it far better.
Three practical filters:
- Does the original have surface? Impasto, texture, gold — if yes, hand-painting earns its 4× premium over a print. If the work is smooth and evenly lit, a giclée gets you most of the way for a quarter of the money.
- How many faces? Catalogue reproductions carry +$25 per face beyond the first. Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party has eight, so it costs $175 more than a landscape of identical size before anyone's picked up a brush.
- Does it read from across the room? The top of the ranking is dominated by works that survive being seen small, in bad light, at distance. That's not a lowbrow criterion. It's a description of what a painting on a domestic wall is actually asked to do, every single day, whether you're looking at it or not.
4. The 25 most reproduced paintings
From Most-Famous-Paintings.com's order ledger: hand-painted oil commissions only, ranked by number of reproductions ordered, 2008–2026, across 2,595,509 oil orders and 211,599 distinct paintings reproduced at least once. Duplicate catalogue entries for the same work are merged. In-copyright artists are excluded — 146,812 order lines held out, because a public demand ranking should list only works anyone is actually free to have copied.
A note on why this ranking puts The Starry Night first and the Mona Lisa second, while other "most copied painting" lists say the opposite: this is a demand ranking, not a fame ranking. It counts what our own customers have actually paid a studio to hand-paint since 2008, in one specific medium. A general "most reproduced painting in the world" ranking, using cultural reach across all reproduction media (prints, tattoos, mugs, silkscreens, hand-painted copies) accumulated over five centuries, puts the Mona Lisa first, and for good reason: it had a four-century head start on every other painting on either list. Our narrower list only asks who wins this one medium, over these eighteen years, and the two questions have different honest answers. Both are true at once, which I know sounds like a cop-out, but it isn't.
Why those twenty-five - four patterns
1. Recognisability at thumbnail size beats art-historical rank. The Starry Night out-orders the Mona Lisa by 23%, and both out-order everything else by a factor of two or more. Both survive being seen small, in bad light, from across a room. Paintings that demand proximity barely register — Rembrandt's Prodigal Son at #24 is the exception that proves it, sitting near the bottom despite being a masterpiece by any measure.
2. Faces suppress demand, and the data shows exactly why. Nineteen of the twenty-five have zero or one face. The three true portraits (Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Lady with an Ermine) are all single heads, and all three are among the hardest things a copyist can be asked to do. Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party at #18 is the only crowd scene in the ranking — and its eight faces carry a $175 complexity surcharge every other entry avoids. Buyers are optimising, without being told to, for the thing that also happens to be cheapest to paint well. Nobody's being cheap on purpose. It just works out that way.
3. Surface reproduces badly, so people have it painted. Kandinsky at #4 and #8, Klimt at #5 and #9, Pollock at #14, Vallotton at #11 — abstract and decorative works are hugely over-represented against their actual gallery-visit popularity. The reason is physical: a print flattens Klimt's gold and Pollock's poured relief into nothing, while a hand-painted copy keeps the surface intact. The works people commission by hand are the works prints fail hardest at.
4. The tail is enormous. 211,599 distinct paintings have been reproduced at least once. The top 25 account for a low single-digit percentage of all orders. This is a market where the head is famous and the tail is personal — someone's grandmother's favourite Kuindzhi; a Matejko that means everything in Poland and nothing fifty miles past the border. Any vendor stocking only the top 50 is serving a small fraction of real demand, and missing the actual business.
The two paintings at the top, side by side
| The Starry Night | Mona Lisa | |
|---|---|---|
| Painted | June 1889, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence | c. 1503–1519, Florence and France |
| Support | Oil on canvas | Oil on poplar panel |
| Size | 73.7 × 92.1 cm, landscape | 77 × 53 cm, portrait |
| Where | MoMA, New York | Louvre, Paris |
| Subject | The view east from an asylum window before sunrise, plus an invented village | A woman, probably Lisa Gherardini |
| Faces | 0 | 1 |
| Why it copies well | Impasto that a print cannot reproduce | The single most recognisable face in art |
| Rank in the ledger | 1st | 2nd |
Girl with a Pearl Earring, third, isn't technically a portrait at all: it's a tronie — a Dutch Golden Age study of a type or character in exotic dress, not a likeness of a named sitter — at 44.5 × 39 cm, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902. The three most-copied faces in the world include one landscape, one portrait, and one painting of nobody in particular. Make of that what you will.
5. And the connection back to your own photograph
The two most-copied paintings on earth are a landscape and a single head.
When you commission a portrait from your own photograph, you're commissioning the Mona Lisa problem: one face, close up, nowhere to hide. That's exactly why every atelier prices by face count, why the independent-artist market charges roughly 3.7× more per square inch for the same surface area, and why the ranking above quietly rewards compositions with no faces in them at all.
6. FAQ
How much does a hand-painted Mona Lisa reproduction cost?
$272 at 77 × 51 cm — within a centimetre of the Louvre panel's 77 × 53 cm — and $353 at 100 × 66 cm, hand-painted in oil on canvas with worldwide shipping included. A giclée print at the same two sizes is $68 and $87. Framing adds $137-$470 at the smaller size and $201-$671 at the larger.
What size is the Mona Lisa?
77 × 53 cm (30.3 × 20.9 in), oil on poplar panel — not canvas — painted c. 1503–1519 and held at the Musée du Louvre. It is considerably smaller than most first-time visitors expect.
Is it legal to have a copy of the Mona Lisa painted?
Yes. Leonardo died in 1519 and the work has been in the public domain for centuries, so commissioning, selling and owning a hand-painted copy is unrestricted. The restrictions that exist are the Louvre's own, and apply only to copying inside the museum.
What are the Louvre's rules for copyists?
Artists apply online with a portfolio; successful applicants get a three-month permit and gallery access 9:30 am–1:30 pm, September to June, excluding Saturdays and holidays. The copy must differ from the original by at least one fifth in size and must carry the copyist's signature, never the master's. Finished work is inspected by museum officials. Roughly 150 copyists work at a time, with about a year's waiting list.
Can a Louvre copyist paint me a full-size Mona Lisa?
No. The one-fifth size rule makes a same-scale copy impossible under the programme. A commercial atelier faces no such restriction, and the near-original 77 × 51 cm rung is in fact the most-ordered Mona Lisa size.
What is the most reproduced painting in the world?
Across 2,595,509 hand-painted commissions placed between 2008 and 2026, Van Gogh's The Starry Night ranks first, ahead of the Mona Lisa by 23%, with Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring third. Nineteen of the top twenty-five have zero or one face.
Why is The Starry Night copied more than the Mona Lisa?
Two reasons. It reads at a distance and at thumbnail size, which is what a painting on a domestic wall is actually asked to do. And its impasto — thick, ridged paint — is precisely what a print cannot reproduce, so hand-painting is a genuine upgrade rather than an expensive alternative.
Which famous paintings are worth having hand-painted rather than printed?
Ones with physical surface: heavy impasto, gold leaf, poured or textured paint. Van Gogh, Klimt, Pollock and Kandinsky all lose most of their character in a print. Smooth, evenly toned works reproduce well as giclée at roughly a quarter of the cost.
How much extra does a crowded painting cost to reproduce?
+$25 per face beyond the first for catalogue reproductions. Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, with eight faces, therefore costs $175 more than a landscape of the same size. For commissions from your own photo the structure is banded instead: up to 3 faces included, then +$75, +$150 and +$300.
How long does a Mona Lisa reproduction take?
Four to five weeks from an atelier at standard production, or under three weeks for +$30 urgent production, including a digital mock-up before painting begins. It will ship unvarnished or lightly retouch-varnished, because oil cures for 6-12 months and varnish applied earlier traps solvent.
Is a reproduction an investment?
No. Reproductions have no secondary market; their value is replacement cost. That is true of a $272 Mona Lisa and of every other entry in the ranking.
Related on Most-Famous-Paintings.com
- Order the actual object this whole article is about: Mona Lisa, hand-painted.
- The painting that actually beats her in our own ledger: The Starry Night.
- Browse the rest of Leonardo's catalogue page — there's more than one face worth copying.
- Third place, and arguably the strangest: Girl with a Pearl Earring, a portrait of nobody in particular.
- See where she actually hangs — the Louvre's own page on the collection.
7. Sources
The paintings
- Mona Lisa — Wikipedia
- Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889 — MoMA
- The Starry Night — Wikipedia
- Girl with a Pearl Earring — Mauritshuis
- Girl with a Pearl Earring — Wikipedia
- Girl with a Pearl Earring — Britannica
- Starry Night Over the Rhône — Wikipedia
The Louvre and its copyists
- Musée du Louvre Visitor Regulations (PDF)
- France's long history of copying Old Masters at the Louvre — The Connexion
- A stroke of genius: the copyists recreating the Louvre's masterpieces — CNN
- How Artists Are Copying Masterpieces at World-Renowned Museums — Artsy
- How Skilled Copyists Leave the Louvre with a Masterpiece Every Year — My Modern Met
- The 'Mona Lisa' Is Moving to a Room of Her Own at the Louvre — Smithsonian Magazine
- Mona Lisa Getting a Room of Her Own in Major Louvre Overhaul — Frommer's
- Mona Lisa replicas and reinterpretations — Wikipedia
Reproduction demand, external context
- The 5 most popular reproduction artworks of all time — Global Artists Guide
- Order a copy of Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) — TopImpressionists
Most-Famous-Paintings.com data
- Ranking aggregated from hand-painted oil commissions only, 12 June 2008 – 8 August 2026; works by artists still in copyright are excluded (146,812 order lines held out). Prices are calculated automatically from canvas size, based on live catalogue data captured 8 August 2026. Size ladder generated from the artwork's own aspect ratio.
