I spent two mornings with the vessel under a low lamp, turning it only a few degrees at a time. The red slip caught first on the bridge of the nose, then on the lifted cheek, while the cream passages stayed quiet like exposed breath beneath fired skin.
Realism is not the opposite of ritual
The old mistake is to treat likeness as biography and pattern as costume. Here the molded head does something more severe: it lets a person become ceremonial without losing the unequal eyelids, the set mouth, the marks drawn in near-black over burnished clay.