Mona Lisa ASCII Art

Tap a rendition to copy every line: the whole painting or a close-up, for a light or a dark screen.

Mona Lisa ASCII Art

_Z" '?3SS2 3E '"JS3 9L_;.-c\/c/?SS @L ' -' JES gE ;; -/3E2 3Q/ "=' -\3S2 J2QS_ _,/cJSS2 JJ3ESC"?7?""?3 [ MONA LISA ]Mona Lisa with a plaque9 lines, 14 wideReady to copy

24 renditions. Tap one to copy it.

Medium, 5 to 9 lines 2

Large, 10 lines and up 22

Next step

How it works

Mona Lisa ASCII art in 26 renditions, 14 to 40 columns wide, each made by a script written for this page from a public-domain photograph: 11 of the whole panel, 15 close-ups of her head, face and eyes.

Read the full guide

Light background or dark screen

On the wrong background a rendition is a photographic negative. The 19 under Light background put a full character where the paint is dark, so on a black screen her face goes dark and her hair glows. The 7 under Dark screen do the reverse. Choose by where it will be read, not where you copy it.

Count the columns, then mind the gaps

Eleven renditions are 40 columns wide and 9 are 30. A line longer than the box wraps, and a wrapped portrait is noise. All need a monospaced font and their spaces kept: the cat ASCII art page explains why, and what Markdown does to the 22 with a backslash. The 5 Squash-proof renditions fill every gap, mostly with apostrophes.

Tips
  • Mona Lisa with a plaque comes first: type a 9-character name over MONA LISA and the brackets stay put.
  • Only Mona Lisa is watching fits a comment box: 8 lines by 30 columns, with a caption of 18 characters.
  • Zoom out before you judge one: characters blur into tone, and the 40-column renditions gain most.

Questions and answers

Where do these renditions come from?

From one photograph on Wikimedia Commons, marked as a faithful reproduction of a public-domain work. A script written for this page cut it into cells and gave each a character, by darkness or by shape. Only the plaques and the caption were typed by hand.

Why is there no one-line Mona Lisa?

In one line she could be anyone, and such faces live on text faces. The smallest rendition that reads is the first, a face 14 columns by 8 lines. Crops of her smile never read as one: for a half smile, try the smirk emoji.

Why do her eyes have no eyebrows?

The painting, in the Louvre, shows none clearly, nor eyelashes, so in Mona Lisa's eyes the brow is blank. Leonardo painted her in oil on a poplar panel, 77 centimetres by 53, about 1503 to 1506, blurring the corners of eyes and mouth: sfumato.

More tools

Browse Text styles

All 24 renditions

Medium, 5 to 9 lines 2

  • Mona Lisa is watching Her gaze is fixed on whoever is looking, so the caption writes itself. Type over I SAW THAT: up to 18 characters keep the line inside 30 columns. 8 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa with a plaque Her face in 8 lines and 14 columns, the narrowest picture here, with a plaque under it. Type over MONA LISA: 9 characters fill the plaque. 9 lines, 14 wide. Keyboard characters only.

Large, 10 lines and up 22

  • Face 20, no gaps Mona Lisa's face at 20 columns with a tick wherever the skin was blank, so a box that squashes spaces cannot pull the eyes out of line. 12 lines, 20 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Face, 20 columns Mona Lisa's face at half width, 12 lines: two eyes, the shadow of the nose, the mouth. For a light background. 12 lines, 20 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Head and shoulders, 40 Mona Lisa from the top of her head to her neckline, with the landscape behind her kept as rows of slashes. For a light background. 20 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Show all 24 renditions (19 more)

Large, 10 lines and up, continued

  • Head and shoulders, dark Mona Lisa from head to neckline for a dark screen. The eyes, the nose and the mouth come out as gaps in the bright face. 20 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Head in 7 characters Mona Lisa's head shaded with seven characters only, a space then . ; * X Q N. The softest of the close-ups, and the nearest to how the paint fades. 24 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Head, shoulders, no gaps Mona Lisa from head to neckline at 30 columns with ticks where the gaps were, for a box that squashes spaces. 15 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa 24, dark screen The 24-column painting for a dark screen, picked by shape. Face, chest and hands are the three bright patches. 16 lines, 24 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa 30 dark, no gaps For a dark screen and a box that squashes spaces at once: the dark paint is rows of ticks where the other dark version has gaps. 21 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa 30, dark screen The 30-column painting for a dark screen: a full character is light paint. The bottom of the panel is so dark that the last line came out blank and was dropped. 20 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa 30, no gaps The 30-column painting with no space anywhere: light paint is a small mark, a tick or a hyphen. A box that squashes spaces has nothing to squash. 21 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa 40, dark screen Drawn the other way round: a full character is light paint, so the face, chest and hands glow on a dark screen. On a light one it looks like a photographic negative. 27 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa in 7 characters Seven characters and nothing else, a space then . ; * X Q N from light to dark. The ink in each was measured in Menlo, where N came out darker than the at sign. 29 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa in a frame The whole painting at 26 columns inside a frame, with every gap filled so that squashed spaces cannot bend it. The plaque is yours to type over and holds 26 characters. 22 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa in her own name Her name over and over, left to right: capitals where the paint is dark, small letters where it is middling, dots and gaps where it is light. 29 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa's eyes The eyes and the bridge of the nose at 40 columns. There are no eyebrows to draw: the painting shows none clearly. 11 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa's face, 40 Her face and nothing else, 40 columns by 24 lines. The eyes are on lines 8 to 10, and the mouth is the row of eight hyphens on line 18. 24 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa's face, dark Her face for a dark screen: the skin is solid and the eyes, nostrils and mouth are gaps in it. The hair is dark paint, so it is the blank strip down the left side. 24 lines, 37 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa's head, 30 Her head at 30 columns and 18 lines. For a light background. 18 lines, 30 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa's head, 40 Closer in: her head fills the 40 columns, the veil and hair down both sides and the neckline at the foot. For a light background. 24 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa's head, dark Her head at 40 columns for a dark screen. The forehead and chest are solid, the hair is mostly gap. 24 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa, 24 columns The smallest whole painting that still reads: the face is a few pale characters near the top, the chest a gap under it, the hands a pale bar near the bottom. Seven characters, for a light background. 17 lines, 24 wide. Keyboard characters only.
  • Mona Lisa, 40 columns The whole painting at the widest this page goes, each character picked for its shape as well as its darkness. Her right hand rests on her left along the bottom. A full character is dark paint, so it wants a light background. 29 lines, 40 wide. Keyboard characters only.

How this list was compiled: Every piece was drawn for this page and checked in a monospaced font on 2026-09-19; none is copied from an archive or another site. On this page drawn means converted: every rendition is the output of a script written for it, run on one photograph of the painting, and the two plaques and the caption are the only lines typed by hand. The script works two ways. By tone, a cell of the picture gets a character from a ramp of seven, a space then . ; * X Q N, whose steps were set by drawing each printable ASCII character in Menlo and counting its ink; in that measurement N came out darker than the at sign. By shape, a cell is cut into a grid 3 wide and 6 tall and given the character whose own ink pattern is nearest, so an edge climbing to the right tends to get a slash. A cell is taken as 2.08 times as tall as it is wide, which is what the cards on this page measure. Light-background renditions put a full character where the paint is dark, dark-screen renditions where it is light, and the no-gaps renditions take the space out of the character pool. Two 30-column renditions that differed from their no-gaps versions only in those ticks were taken out on 2026-09-19, which leaves 24. Each character was looked up in the Unicode Character Database, version 18.0.0: names and categories in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt, width classes in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/EastAsianWidth.txt, the Emoji property in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt, all read on 2026-09-19. Keyboard characters only means the 95 printable ASCII characters, U+0020 to U+007E. Squash-proof means no line starts with a space and no two spaces touch. The comment box badge means at most 8 lines and 30 columns: a rule of thumb of this site, not a promise about any app. The photograph is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg, read on 2026-09-19: Wikimedia Commons tags it PD-Art, a faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art in the public domain, which Commons treats as public domain in the United States while saying that re-use may be restricted elsewhere; the retoucher released the retouched version into the public domain, and the Commons API returned Public domain, not copyrighted, no attribution required. The script read the 500-pixel thumbnail of that file, fetched from thumb.wikimedia.org on 2026-09-19. Facts about the painting in the notes and on the page (Leonardo da Vinci, about 1503 to 1506, oil on a poplar panel, 77 by 53 centimetres, in the Louvre, no clearly visible eyebrows, her right hand resting on her left, her gaze fixed on the observer, sfumato) were checked against https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa on 2026-09-19. Licence: own work, converted by script from a Wikimedia Commons photograph that Commons tags PD-Art (see the source note)