Musculata Images

[ValentinianVictrix]

Real musculatas are not anatomically correct. The navel on the armour is significantly higher than the navel on a human. The bottom of most breastplates is actually pretty close to navel level. If your metal breastplate was designed like the historical ones you'd have no problem bending over.

Hmmm, quite interesting. I haven't noticed this before now, but I do see what you are talking about.

It is physically impossible for leather armour to flex the way he seems to think.

This is something that bothers me. I can't possibly imagine a material that can both bend the way the statues do, and simultaneously hold the detailed muscular form that we see (other than stone). This leads me to believe that both the bends that we see in on statuary musculata, as well as the lack of certain more practical aspects of the musculata (such as hinges and so on) are the way they are for artistic convention.

Now, despite the fact that just making this reference in a debate about real evidence that we have from ancient Rome may completely discredit everything I say in regards to this issue, I will bring it up anyway - HBOs Rome. In the show, all of the musculata are leather. Now before I even knew of this whole debate about the existence of the leather musculata, I did not pay much attention to them. They looked decent...but that was the full extent of the attention that I paid them. Having gone back and re-watched the shows, in which many different examples are shown, I noticed something interesting - the leather musculatas do hold their muscular form quite well, but they don't bend. And yes, yes, I know that these are modern recreations made by artisans who probably have neither care nor clue as to how the ancients would have done them. But still, there's only so much the artist/artisan can affect a medium such as leather, no? The only worry I have with bringing this "example" up is if someone informs me that HBO really made them out of plastic or rubber to keep costs down haha.

Some leathers can be quite thick and retain some flexibility. I have a number of belts of various thicknesses, depending on the type of trouser I am wearing depends on the thickness of the belt i.e. when wearing jeans I wear quite a wide, thick belt that is very tough butl flexible enough to go around my waist and will last years before needing replacing (my last Jean's belt finally broke about 5 years ago after 17 years of service, and I wear jeans daily!).

I have handled cuirasses made for TV and film productions that have been made out of leather, the majority featured in 1950's/60's 'Sword & Sandal' epics. Not only do they look good, they were in turn stiff around the chest but flexible around the arms and waist area where they were cut into the classic strip petruges. I think the cuirasses in 'Gladiator' featuring Russel Crow were also made out of leather.

Whether the muscle cuirasses seen on monumental works and in art were made from leather is unknown, but we can presume that the ones that were coloured blue were probably made from iron.

I would not discount a proportion of cuirasses made out of leather on the basis of there is no evidence either for or against at this moment in time.