I thought of Escher as soon as I saw the first img and read the first paragraph, but was surprised to find they're actually connected.

I too believe, generally, that art strives for Truth, just like science. Even completely made up literature. When a Rowling writes a Harry Potter, she isn't just making things up. She's interpreting her own life symbolically, and choosing a means of telling it that won't bore the reader. Fact itself will often fall on deaf ears, but embellishing it into fiction will transfer it to the listener in its proper size. It's like a snowball that melts as it travels. The sun that melts it is the Ego. We don't care about things that happen to others, or we care less than they do. If they are to make their own lived truth and experience concrete to us, they must exaggerate it, so that by the time it gets to our ears, passes through all the peelers of selfishness, the layers that will remain will represent its actual size. So we find ourselves not crying at a mere news report of a death, but we cry because a fictional hero died. I think the fictional death, in this sense, carries better the actual fact and experience of death.