Musculata Images

[Alexand96]

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.