03-30-2016, 12:56 PM
Usually I'm quite in favour of the possible verisimilitude of artistic representations; too many things get discounted as 'classicising' or even 'artistic license' if they don't fit our expectations. However, in this case I'd be more cautious: Rome had been demilitarised for over a century by the time these mosaics were made, excepting the brief influx of Alaric's Goths a few decades before, and the artist's ideas of what a soldier, particularly a 'Roman soldier' might look like could hardly be expected to be accurate.
The depictions here are probably based on stylised military kit of the sort that appears on coin images, perhaps with some details from the various arches and monuments that would still be visible in Rome at that time.
Having said that, there are some odd details - those helmets with the inverted V brim at the front (again!), and what looks like knee-length mail breeches in the second image (and interpretation of the legwear on Trajan's Column, maybe?). And some of these figures do closely resemble the ones in the Vatican Virgil manuscript, which might suggest they were both drawing on the same source(s)...
The depictions here are probably based on stylised military kit of the sort that appears on coin images, perhaps with some details from the various arches and monuments that would still be visible in Rome at that time.
Having said that, there are some odd details - those helmets with the inverted V brim at the front (again!), and what looks like knee-length mail breeches in the second image (and interpretation of the legwear on Trajan's Column, maybe?). And some of these figures do closely resemble the ones in the Vatican Virgil manuscript, which might suggest they were both drawing on the same source(s)...
Nathan Ross
