Leather Cuirass

[MeinPanzer]

I highly doubt it, because there are other, much lighter elements of the painting beside it, such as the cheek pieces of the helmet on the right of the shield.

They could be iron, having no yellow tone? The same with the pair of cheek pieces in the other photo I posted, where the bowl of the right hand helmet is off white with a red stripe, and a stripe of some other colour, but the cheek pieces bright and neutral.
http://www.macedonian-heritage.gr/Helle ... l/d14g.jpg

And that's my point exactly. If the cuirasses were white or off-white and underwent some sort of browning process, we would expect the rest of the painting to do so, but we find lighter colours that have not been browned all around them. The other helmet is yellow (bronze) with a red and a black stripe, btw.

Since we apparently accept painted helmets, why not painted corselets?

Because cuirasses would inevitably undergo much more rough contact than a helmet just from its wearer, let alone any attacks from the enemy. Not to mention that these textile cuirasses would warp and bend unlike a metal helmet and so quickly damage any paint applied.

Re-enactors seem to have no trouble colouring theirs, and there seems to be a lot more re-enactors with leather spolades, or composite corselets, than multi-layered linen ones. As I said earlier, colours in art can't be conclusive.You might as well argue the brown/pink/beige ones are linen painted to look like leather !

We should be concerned about ancient methods of colouring, not modern reconstructors'. And there is a major issue at hand: linen can easily be dyed to any colour on the spectrum and easily patterned, while leather cannot with ancient methods.

While Ruben argues that dyeing or painting leather would have been hard to do and rather temporary, I know that it was all the rage in later eras, when no item of leather kit would be left unpainted, by any self-respecting battlefield poser, and I believe there is evidence from Ancient Greece for painted leather kit, other than armour.

The only other elements in leather that were dyed that I know of were dyed red. If anyone can present more evidence to the contrary, I'd be happy to see it.