Gambesons in roman times?

[Dan Howard]

Extant finds are not the only sources and if we only kept to extant finds we'd have very little to show for in terms of knowledge about armour. Artistic depictions and written mentions serve as well

Artistic depictions are useless because they can never be interpreted in only one way. If you show some armour to a class full of people and ask them to draw it, every single person will render it differently. If you don't have the original item, how do you know which, if any, are depicted accurately?

and there's written mentions of textile armour in the early middle ages that can easily be interpreted as being unquilted.

Produce one.

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What sort of detail do you think might have been painted onto these to make them look different? They are clearly body armour, they do not resemble mail or scale or any other known armour type, which sculptors were quite capable of showing. They do appear to feature large padded or quilted sections. What else might they be?

The first two of your images are likely depicting scale armour with pteruges. The vertical lines were carved and the details of the individual scales were painted. The one with the diamond crosshatching is likely depicting mail. We have hundreds of medieval images that render mail with crosshatching and not a single extant textile example that is made with diamond crosshatch quilting. Why would you think it is textile armour when there is no precedent for it?