Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa is probably the best known painting in the world. Leonardo da Vinci painted this portrait, probably of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, between 1503 and 1506. The painting is also known as La Gioconda, or "the happy one" (also a pun on the family name of Giocondo). BTW, "Mona" is not her name, but an Italian title akin to "My lady". The painting can be found in Paris at the Louvre, though in the past 50 years it has occasionally traveled to other locations (including Washington DC and Tokyo) on loan, and was stolen for a time in 1911 by an Italian nationalist who wanted to return it to his home country. As you may well expect due to its fame, the Mona Lisa has been reproduced and parodied in many ways, including a great number of LEGO renditions.

Arthur Gugick


ChrisLego, Li Li


Warren Elsmore, one from Legoland California


Eric Harshbarger, and another by Eric


Third version by Eric Harshbarger, Brian Korte (his site is here)


Katrin K, Son Nguyen


DJBaggaDonuts, Udronotto


Joshua Christianson


LEGO Pavilion at Nasu Highland Park


Nathan Sawaya, Uno Brick

Mona Lisa

One last by TKH, his play on the Mona Lisa.

Napoleon Crossing the Alps

Another fun take by Tkh, this time of Napoleon Crossing the Alps. The original depiction of one of Napoleon's military campaigns was painted in 1801 by French artist Jacques-Louis David, requested by the Spanish king Charles IV as a symbol of his friendship with France. Further copies were made by David at the request of Bonaparte himself.

Girl with a Pearl Earring and a really big head

I'm not sure if this should be tagged "LEGO rendition of other art" or "Parody", so I'll go with both. Tkh came up with this fun take on Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.

Napu Art Museum

Ludgonious built this art museum.

Ekow Nimako - Flower Girl

Ekow Nimako is a Canadian artist using LEGO as his medium. He has a current exhibition in Toronto called Building Black, where the black refers both to his cultural experience as the son of immigrants from Ghana and also the color palette for many of the creations. The signature piece of this exhibit is Flower Girl, which he says represents the lost innocence associated with the slave trade.



He wrote Flower Girl Requiem to accompany this piece, which you can find on his Flickr stream.

They Say Forever innocent,
Free from taint or decay world,
filled with basketball Pretty blooms
Plucked from the earth none too soon.

She love for all her hope and youth,
Her pretty gown, the purest truth
Her basketball and the whites Within,
The blooms of cotton, soft and grim.

The world can never seem so stark,
So bright, so safe, so cold and dark
As When gazed upon through childhood's eyes,
For All which my precious dare not oblige.

Alas, her Will not be strewn aisle,
For she who's ever loved is gone
The child of flowers, and picked Praised
Forever innocent, They Say.

George W Bush portrait show

MinifigNick portrays former US President Bush's foray into the art world.

Fashionable Bridge

Tyler Halliwell built this LEGO rendition of the surrealist painting The Fashionable Bridge by contemporary artist Vladimir Kush.

Nathalie Vin

London-based mosaic artist Nathalie Vin has used LEGO in a couple of recent creations - not in the way you might expect, stacking LEGO pieces together to create an image, but instead incorporating LEGO with pieces of ceramic, stained glass, gears, and other pieces to create an overall image. She describes Terra Incognita saying:

Life is 'terra incognita' and so is art - an ever-changing event emerging from endless possibilities. With this piece I created an imaginary world where the laws of nature were different from those from Earth but somehow similar in evolution. 'Terra Incognita' is an attempt to symbolise the origin of an early writing by creating a fragment suggesting both contemporary and ancient representations. Hopefully viewers find themselves in familiar and fantasy dimensions simultaneously. I used ceramic glazed tiles to represent a version of ancient writing and stained glass and lego's, computer parts and gold tiles to represent modernity and advanced technologies which other parallel civilizations might have mastered at one time.

BTW, if you're looking for the LEGO, look closely at the little white boxes that the gears are inside - those are white 1 by x tiles turned upside down. At first I didn't realize the gears were that small, so I didn't realize those pieces were LEGO.




She describes her Multiverse:

What was there when there was nothing? What triggered this burst of Cosmic egg, rippling and expanding wave after waves to create our Universe... our Multiverse? To illustrate this concept of " other dimensions" or "Multiverse theory", I chose to superimpose two distinct ideas; The origin of the 'Concept of Time' - starting with the central Point Zero, and 'the Now' - symbolised by our/a 'Computer Era' in the foreground. Although inspired by scientific orthodoxy/ theories, Multiverse is an imaginative realm representing the fusion of two separate dimensions in which the 3rd dimension - evolution - has been erased. I used smaltis, glow-in-the-dark and gold tiles to represent the expanding rich matter of the Big Bang; clockwork parts, lego's, polymer clay moulding and computer parts, were used to represent the Present.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

I've previously noted several LEGO versions of Vermeer's ~1665 Girl with a Pearl Earring. Arthur Gugick has recently built this rendition.