Muscled Cuirasses of Boiled Leather?

[Lindsay_Powell]

Boiled leather cuirasses? It seems there may be something in it, at least according to Raffaele D’Amato and Graham Sumner in their new book 'Arms and Armour of the Imperial Roman Soldier 112BC-AD192', Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2009 (for a summary see my new blog at http://bit.ly/duHSL1 ). Do you agree with their findings?

[Astiryu1]

I have seen the Custard armor before there is another type called d3o and there is testing on youtube.
[url:kmujca4t]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsRnfVKYvCA[/url]
I have wanted a functional Batsuit since I was 7 years old! Now I have options. :twisted: I always have a problem with the ears on my rubber mask. :x
I will have to read the book but I always liked leather as an armor type. There are also called "Spolas" the leather equivalent of the Linothorax.

[Dan Howard]

Do you agree with their findings?

There is evidence for Roman armour being made of leather or hide scale/lamellar but that is all. The rest of D'Amato's "evidence" is wishful thinking.

[Matthew Amt]

Ave!

There doesn't seem to be any evidence of Roman boiled leather at all. And there is no point that I can see for making aristocratic armor like a muscled cuirass out of leather, when the whole idea was to shine like a god and look expensive. That means metal. I'm a lot more open to the concept of leather or rawhide armor than I used to be, but there's still zippo to suggest a leather musculata.

There are already several LONG threads on this topic, if you do some searching and digging.

Matthew

[Crispvs]

Travis Lee Clarke's site no longer seems to exist, which is a great pity, but if you search through RAT you should see some of the evidence he put up to suggest that high ranking Roman officers actually might have had leather muscle cuirasses, if only for parade purposes, although the depictions he found were clearly of items which were not intended for use in combat.

Crispvs

[Medicus matt]

but there's still zippo to suggest a leather musculata.

There's a sculpture in the museum in Tripoli of someone (I forget who...and it was only last weekend that I saw it :oops: ) wearing a musculata. No seam on the left hand side, obvious seam/opening with a sliding pin closure under the right.

Certainly 'suggests' leather rather than bronze. I know bronze can be quite springy, but not that springy.

[Dan Howard]

It doesn't suggest anything except that it is unreasonable to try and interpret a 2000 year-old sculpture the same way that we would interpret a modern photograph.

[Crispvs]

Rather better than that suggestion are a number of sculpures which Travis pointed out two or three years ago which showed cuirasses sitting on the ground next to the emperor which almost look as if they are made of rubber and seem to be sagging down under their own weight. Sorry I don't have a picture to post up of any of them.

Crispvs

[Medicus matt]

It doesn't suggest anything except that it is unreasonable to try and interpret a 2000 year-old sculpture the same way that we would interpret a modern photograph.

It might not suggest it to you Dan, but it is a very detailed sculpture, not an abstract piece. I'll put up a picture of it when I can get somewhere that has a decent net connection.
Given the degree of detail in the sculpture, I would have thought that the inclusion of details like the pin closures and seam on just the one side would be an indication that the artist had seen what he was depicting. If he was just making it up then why bother with that sort of detail at all? If it's artistic license then it's a very mundane detail to fabricate and would have been a real pig to carve.

I'm not claiming that an artistic depiction of this kind shoud be taken as proof of the existance of leather musculata, but I fail to see how it can be dismissed as not even being suggestive of the same.

The question of whether that musculata was merely a display piece as opposed to functional armour is another matter.

[Graham Sumner]

I agree with you there Matt and so does Dan really, just as long as you don't call it armour!

Graham.

[Matthew Amt]

That's the real sticking point--are we talking about ARMOR, or a cuirass-like-object that only LOOKS like armor? (Sorry, I should have specified in my first post that *I* was thinking of *armor*!) Dan and I generally think alike, though I tend to give artwork a little more weight at least in this case. We really have been over this very topic several times, but Travis did find a number of sculptural features that just do NOT look like metal, even on what looked like a metal cuirass at first glance. So my take is that there was something cuirass-shaped but made of leather (or something flexible) and not meant as battle protection. But having had to make a U-turn on the whole linothorax/spolas debate, I'm prepared to do the same thing here! Gonna need more *evidence*, though...

Also bear in mind that I still incorporate some knee-jerk reaction into my responses, because of the overwhelming popular Hollywood concept of BROWN armor. I strongly believe that even if leather things were worn for battle or just for decoration, there were COLORFUL. We already know that statues like that were commonly painted in rather gaudy colors. So I'm willing to sound a little strong if it helps move people away from the brown musculata camp...

Valete,

Matthew

[Graham Sumner]

because of the overwhelming popular Hollywood concept of BROWN armor. I strongly believe that even if leather things were worn for battle or just for decoration, there were COLORFUL.

I would certainly agree there Matthew, see my article on Facilis in the latest Ancient Warfare Special!

Graham.

[Dan Howard]

The original post was about boiled leather. This implies that the material was hardened. How is a sculpture that shows a flexible material relevant? A hardened leather cuirass has to be constructed the same as a metallic cuirass, which would include seams on both sides and a method of joining the two halves together. The leather also has to be quite thick - trying to harden light leather causes it to warp and crack.

[Matthew Amt]

Very good point, Dan, thanks! Boiled leather is a very specific substance, and it's rigid. We should try to avoid getting dragged off on tangents, but it won't be easy!

Matthew

[Dan Howard]

FWIW leather was never hardened by "boiling". Today the word has a very specific definition - cooking an item in a liquid that is hot enough to begin converting to gas (e.g. water is 100deg C). The original French term "bouilli" translates as "boiled" but at the time the exact temperature of the liquid was irrelevant. Cuir boilli simply refers to leather that has been hardened by immersing it in hot water. The range of temperatures required for this task is, in practice, significantly lower than its boiling point. To avoid confusion I usually refer to cuir bouilli as "hardened leather" rather than "boiled leather".