The Mona Lisa has been parodied more than any other painting in history, and the tradition is older than you might expect — the first known example dates from 1887. Here are the ones that matter, and why this particular picture attracts them.
Why the Mona Lisa and not some other painting
Two reasons, and the second is the one people usually miss.
It is universally recognized. Parody depends on the audience knowing the original instantly. There is a very short list of images that qualify, and this one is at the top of it.
Its fame is largely an accident of 1911. The painting was well regarded through the nineteenth century but not the phenomenon it is now. In August 1911 it was stolen from the Louvre by Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian workman who had helped build its protective case. It was missing for two years, and the newspaper coverage of the theft, the empty wall, the false leads and the eventual recovery in Florence turned it into the most famous painting in the world.
The parodies followed the fame. By the 1910s and 20s the image was ubiquitous enough that defacing it meant something.
The parodies worth knowing
Eugène Bataille, Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe (1887)
The first known parody, published under the pen name Sapeck in a satirical magazine. A reproduction of the painting with a pipe added, blowing smoke rings. Straightforward visual joke, and it predates the theft that made the original a household image — which tells you the picture already had enough standing to be worth mocking.
Marcel Duchamp, L.H.O.O.Q. (1919)
The most important one. Duchamp bought a cheap postcard reproduction, drew a moustache and goatee on it in pencil, and wrote five letters underneath. Read aloud in French those letters form a crude sentence about the sitter, which is the whole joke.
It matters beyond the gag. Duchamp was attacking the idea of the sacred original and the reverence surrounding museum art — taking the most venerated image available and treating it as raw material. It became a foundational work of Dada and one of the most influential gestures in twentieth-century art. Nearly every parody since is downstream of it.
Salvador Dalí and Philippe Halsman, Self Portrait as Mona Lisa (1954)
A photographic composite putting Dalí's own face, complete with his moustache, onto the Mona Lisa's body, with hands full of coins. Partly a joke about Dalí's own showmanship and appetite for money, partly a direct nod to Duchamp's moustache thirty-five years earlier.
Andy Warhol, Thirty Are Better Than One (1963)
Warhol silkscreened the Mona Lisa thirty times in a grid. Made around the painting's tour to the United States, when enormous crowds queued to see it, the point is in the title: mechanical repetition applied to the ultimate unique object. Repetition drains the aura, which was exactly Warhol's subject throughout his career.
Fernando Botero, Mona Lisa, Age Twelve (1959)
The Colombian painter's version, rendered in his characteristic inflated volumes. Affectionate rather than satirical — Botero applied the same treatment to many old masters, and the humor comes from the style rather than from mockery of the subject.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mona Lisa (1983)
Basquiat set the face alongside the pyramid and eye from the dollar bill, putting the painting's status as an object of value directly on the canvas.
Banksy
Several, in stencil form on walls, most famously a version armed with a rocket launcher. The joke depends on the collision between the most respectable image in art and the least respectable setting.
What an art parody actually is
Copying a recognizable work in order to say something — which can be mockery, homage, or an argument about art itself. The audience has to know the original, so parody clusters tightly around a handful of very famous images.
It is not the same as a forgery, which conceals that it is a copy, or a study, which copies in order to learn. A parody wants you to notice the difference between it and the thing it references. That difference is where the meaning is.
Warhol's soup cans and Lichtenstein's comic panels work the same way, taking familiar commercial imagery and shifting its context.
Can you make your own?
For practical purposes, yes.
Leonardo died in 1519, and the painting is firmly in the public domain. There is no estate, no royalty and nobody to ask. You can paint your own version, sell it, print it on a shirt, or draw a moustache on it, as Duchamp did.
Two caveats worth knowing rather than worrying about. A specific photograph of the painting may carry its own rights depending on the jurisdiction and who took it, so it is safer to work from an image you know is freely licensed than from any picture you find online. And a modern parody by a living artist — Banksy's, say — is that artist's work and protected accordingly. Copying Leonardo is free; copying Duchamp's copy is not.
Seeing the original
It hangs in the Salle des États at the Louvre, behind bulletproof glass, and the encounter surprises most people. The painting is small — roughly 30 by 21 inches — and the room is crowded. Expect a queue and a limited amount of time in front of it.
Book in advance, go early or late in the day, and go on a weekday if you can. Many visitors report enjoying the rest of the Louvre's Italian collection considerably more, and the galleries around it are usually near-empty by comparison.
If you would rather paint a portrait than look at one
The endless reworking of this one image is a reminder that portraits hold attention in a way other subjects do not — something about a face looking back.
Ledgebay's kits are licensed artwork rather than gallery reproductions, so there is no Mona Lisa in the catalog. But a portrait of someone you actually know beats a copy of a famous stranger, and a custom paint by numbers canvas made from your own photograph is the closest thing to it. The customer gallery has plenty of finished ones, and you can browse the full range in the shop.
