leather cuirass

[MeinPanzer]

It depends on the pigments. Without a chemical analysis both could be the case. Maybe the painter had no blue, but had to have the thing finished? But, as I said, it doesn´t really matter for the argument...

If you look at photos of re-enactors who are situated in a field of grass with trees around, the reflection in steel can have a lot of green from the environment. The artist may have been more accurate than thought, or the original pigment could have been blue-green to represent both sky and grass, blurred in the metal's reflection :wink:

Here's what I mean, using environment maps used to light scenes and reflections in CGI:





http://www.sparse.org/3d.html

If all of the colours are averaged in any of those given photos, they come out to something like this:

I highly doubt it. We don't see any sort of depiction of reflection on metal in painting at this time beyond very simple stuff in complex paintings (like the shield reflecting the fallen man in the Alexander mosaic), and bronze is consistently depicted in yellow or brown, while iron is shown in blue or grey.