Late Roman Attic helmets

[Nathan Ross]

one of the difficulties of the artist was to show as much of the face of the men as possible. Meaning that nasals, closed cheekplates etc were 'dropped' and that perspective forced the artist to portray something that did not resemble an actually existing helmet.

But do we know this? Or is it just an assumption?

Perhaps artists drew from earlier examples... the so-called 'Attic helmet' may not have been a reality but a product of artistic licence.

Perhaps - if there were any earlier examples. But these helmets appear quite suddenly in Roman art and rapidly become near-ubiquitous. They appear on both frontier tombstone reliefs and offical imperial art, don't look like anything else, and look enough like each other to suggest a real source. Unless the Romans all simultaneously agreed, some time c.200, to start depicting soldiers with the same sort of fantasy helmet then I think we should assume that it was real before passing it off as 'artistic license', 'classicizing' or 'archaicising' ideals, sculptural error or whatever other excuses are generally used to banish things we don't like the look of or that don't fit with our preconceptions or our narrow selection of available evidence... ;-)

100% accurate artistic representation from the Arch of Constantine

We've discussed this before as well! :-)

While there are obvious and conventional expedients of representation on the Constantinian friezes of the Arch (relative sizes of figures, buildings etc), there are enough particular details to imply that the artist was drawing on reality rather than ideal forms or his own imagination. The archers carrying arrows in their headbands were noted before, I think. Those unusual crests on the helmets (or reins, if you prefer!) for another - Speidel I think sees them as horns and makes the soldiers into 'Cornuti' - I think they look more like feathers myself. And so on.

The very accurate detail of the sword and belt from the Severius Acceptus relief suggests that the other bits, including the helmet and that odd armour-garment, are also based on real originals.