"What are these drawings? Are they just cruel jokes?" Some of the great artists have the skill of capturing "adjacent worlds" for the lack of a better word. Th

"What are these drawings? Are they just cruel jokes?" Some of the great artists have the skill of capturing "adjacent worlds" for the lack of a better word. The works "David" and "Venus" are super-human portraits of those winged guys, while these Leonardo's works are infernal portraits. That's what gives them the eerie vibe. "They are not really funny, for one thing. They have a despairing, even scary, power." He adds: "Of monstrous faces I shall say nothing because they naturally stay in the mind." He's tacitly saying that those are visions, not drawings of something he made up. There are other artists with this skill. A famous modern example is Giger's "alien" portrait that he saw in a dream. Edit: as for Mona Lisa, it's a mix of the two worlds, it's like drawing a face of a real pharaoh on the body of a real lion.