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. And once I found out why, I could not stop telling people about it at dinner, which is how I lost two friends and gained this article.

The 30-Second Answer

It is legal, because the painting entered the public domain roughly four centuries before copyright was invented. 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.

And here is the part I got wrong for years: the Mona Lisa is not the most-copied painting in the world. Across 2,595,509 hand-painted commissions placed between 2008 and 2026, she comes second. Van Gogh's The Starry Night out-orders her by 23%.

The Original, in Numbers

Fifty seconds. Sit with that. The most-copied face in Western art is one that almost nobody has ever looked at for a full minute. You have spent longer choosing a sandwich. I have spent longer choosing a sandwich, and I was not even hungry.

She is also small. Everybody says this and everybody is still surprised. Poplar panel, about the size of a large cushion, and you cannot get within four metres of her.

What a Reproduction Costs, at Two Sizes

Reproduction size ladders are generated from each artwork's own aspect ratio — for this painting a tall, narrow 0.663 wide-to-tall — stepping the surface area up rung by rung and capping 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)

Size B — the statement wall: 100.2 × 66.4 cm (39.4 × 26.1 in)

Read the two together and the whole cost structure falls out of the table like a coin out of a coat. The canvas grew 68% in area and the painting price grew 30%, because painting prices scale sub-linearly with area. But the frame price grew 47%, because framing cost is driven by perimeter and by volumetric shipping weight, and both of those scale faster than a painter's hours do.

At large sizes, the frame is the expensive half of the order. Which is precisely why, across 2,595,509 hand-painted oil orders, only 33% included one. Two thirds of buyers looked at that number and quietly decided their local framer could handle it. They were right.

Is It Legal to Have a Copy of the Mona Lisa Painted?

Leonardo died in 1519. The painting has been in the public domain for centuries; no copyright subsists in it, and commissioning, selling, owning or hanging a hand-painted copy is unrestricted. The same is true of every painting in the ranking below, 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 are excluded from that list.

What is restricted is copying inside the Louvre. The museum has run a copyists' programme for centuries, and the rules are gloriously specific:

• 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 the building.

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, and that rung is the most-ordered Mona Lisa size in the entire ledger.

Two centimetres of institutional honesty, and an entire category of demand living just outside it. I love this fact. I love it the way I love a good heist film.

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. A copy is a legitimate, openly declared copy. Any vendor offering to make it indistinguishable is not selling you a reproduction. They are selling you the first half of a crime.

Should I Get the Same Size as the Original?

• Same-scale carries meaning that no other size does. At 77 × 51 cm the head sits at the size Leonardo 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 completely. She was made to be looked at by one person, close, for a long time. She is currently being looked at by four hundred people at once, from a distance, through a phone.
• Bigger costs surprisingly little. +68% area for +30% price. If the wall is large, the larger rung is better value per square centimetre.
• 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 reverse.

For a masterpiece copy, keeping the original's aspect ratio matters more than matching its dimensions. The Mona Lisa is a tall, narrow 0.663; forced into a standard 4:5 canvas she loses the pillars and the parapet at the edges, which are half the composition's architecture. Crop those and you have a nice picture of a woman. Keep them and you have the painting.

Where Else You Can Buy a Mona Lisa, and What They Charge

I priced the same idea — a hand-painted oil reproduction of a famous painting, roughly living-room scale — across the specialists and, for contrast, across one real museum. The spread is wider than the spread on the paintings themselves.

Read that table with the Louvre's one-fifth rule still in your head and something clicks into place.

Every commercial vendor on this list will happily sell you a same-scale masterpiece. The one institution with genuine curatorial custody of its own paintings — the MFA in Boston — will not hand-paint you anything at all. It sells archival pigment ink on rag paper or cotton canvas, states plainly that some works are restricted from reproduction entirely, and lets the machine do the copying.

Museums are careful about copies for the same reason the Louvre shaves two centimetres off the width. Not because copying is shameful. Because a copy that could be mistaken for an original is a different object with different consequences, and every serious institution in the world has decided, independently, that the way to stay clean is to make the copy visibly, unarguably a copy.

The commercial version of that principle is the one I gave you above: an honest studio makes a declared copy, signed by nobody, craquelure-free. Anyone selling indistinguishability is not in the reproduction business.

Which Painting Should I Actually Have Copied?

The ranking below shows people converging, without being told 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. 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:

1. 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 and nobody will ever know.
2. 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 anybody has picked up a brush.
3. 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 is not a lowbrow criterion. That is a plain description of what a painting on a domestic wall is actually asked to do, all day, forever, while people walk past it carrying laundry.

The 25 Most Reproduced Paintings

From published order ledgers at TopImpressionists.com, WahooArt.com and ArtsDot.com — 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 free to have copied.

A note on why this list puts The Starry Night first and the Mona Lisa second, when other "most copied painting" lists say the opposite. This is a demand ranking, not a fame ranking. It counts what customers have actually paid a studio to hand-paint since 2008, in one specific medium. A general "most reproduced painting in the world" ranking — one that measures cultural reach across all reproduction media, prints and tattoos and mugs and silkscreens and hand-painted copies, accumulated over five centuries — puts the Mona Lisa first, and it is right to. She had a four-century head start on every other painting on either list. This narrower list only asks who wins this one medium, over these eighteen years. Different questions, different honest answers, both true at once.

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, upside down, in a hallway. Paintings that need proximity barely register. Rembrandt's Prodigal Son at #24 is the exception that proves the rule — and it is, not coincidentally, the entry I would most like to own and least expect anyone else to.

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 and mostly without knowing it, for the thing that also happens to be cheapest to paint well. That is a beautiful accident and I did not expect to find it.

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 gallery-visit popularity. The reason is purely physical: a print flattens Klimt's gold and Pollock's poured relief into nothing, while a hand-painted copy keeps the ridge, the drag, the skid. The works people commission by hand are precisely the works prints fail hardest at. The market figured this out with no help from any critic, including me.

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 part of it that has feelings attached.

The Two Paintings at the Top, Side by Side

And Girl with a Pearl Earring, third, is not technically a portrait at all. It is a tronie — a Dutch Golden Age study of a type or a character in exotic dress, not a likeness of any named sitter — measuring 44.5 × 39 cm, in the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.

So the three most-copied faces in the world include one landscape, one portrait, and one painting of nobody in particular. I find that unreasonably moving.

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 are commissioning the Mona Lisa problem: one face, close up, nowhere to hide. That is 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.

You are not buying a picture. You are buying somebody's willingness to get a mouth right.

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

The Verdict

Buy the near-original size. Skip the gilt. Hang her at eye height in a room where somebody sits down.

Because the thing nobody in the Louvre gets — the thing that costs $272 and eight thousand miles of freight — is fifty-one more seconds.

Further Reading

• Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) — catalogue entry and reproduction options.
• The Starry Night — the ledger's number one, and the best argument in this article for hand-painting over print.
• Mastering Art Collecting: Acquiring Museum-Quality Famous Reproductions — how to curate by movement rather than by fame.
• The Louvre, Paris — the collection page behind half the facts here.
• Beyond the Print: Why Hand-Painted Oil Masterpieces Outshine Digital Reproductions — the impasto argument, at length.

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.com

Network data

• Ranking aggregated from hand-painted oil reproduction orders placed across TopImpressionists.com, WahooArt.com and ArtsDot.com, 12 June 2008 – 8 August 2026; works by artists still in copyright excluded (146,812 order lines held out).
• Prices quoted live from the published order pages, August 2026; size ladder generated from the artwork's own aspect ratio.

Data as of 8 August 2026. USD, ex-options, worldwide shipping included.