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A bald old man in profile with a hooked nose and jutting lower lip. One of the many grotesque heads he drew for study and amusement.
Vasari wrote that Leonardo would follow a person with a striking face all day to remember it, then go home and draw it as if the person were present.
His grotesques exaggerate a nose, a chin or a missing tooth until the face becomes comic or monstrous. They are a study of how far a face can stray from the ideal measures he drew in the Vitruvian Man and still look human.
He also advised painters to carry a small book and note faces and gestures in the street. Many of these heads were later copied and engraved, and they spread across Europe long after his death.
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by Marie Curie 
