Leather Cuirass

[Tarbicus]

If the cuirasses were white or off-white and underwent some sort of browning process, we would expect the rest of the painting to do so, but we find lighter colours that have not been browned all around them. The other helmet is yellow (bronze) with a red and a black stripe, btw.

It doesn't necessarily follow that the cheek pieces must have been painted with the same paint as the wider wall to be white. If the effect was to be metallic that may have involved other pigments to differentiate it from the corslet, which may decay differently over time.

You have no way of being so definitive that off-white/yellowish is bronze, either. Is the opposite helm pure copper?