"Painting guidelines for Caesarian are Romans" Topic

Can anyone provide a good source for painting Caesarian late Republican Romans?

Some of the questions I have are shields of this period, colors and patterns for example.

What about tunic colors? Does modern research still suggest red tunics?

Are the plumes in the helmets black?

Thanks in advance,

Kyle

There is still some uncertainty on tunic colours, some people favouring red and some off-white, while "no uniform at all" is still a possible option. The first of Graham Sumner's "Roman Military Clothing" Ospreys sums up the evidence. Personally I favour red tunics for battle (a late-antique source says that Romans under the Republic wore red on the day of battle only; the suggestion in Plutarch's "Lucullus" that the Romans wore their best clothes for battle but not on the march supports the idea of a conspicuous "battledress"; etc) but a non-uniform mix for marching dress, fatigue duty, etc.

Black for helmet crests is a guess, really, based on the use of black and crimson feathers in earlier armies.

Also red looks great. My Romans are in red tunics, Italian allies in white. For my Punic Roman army I painted all the shields red and the advancing wall looks intimidating. Not sure if the picture below gives the full effect.

‌25 by Eusebeia2002, on Flickr

I go for red and white a la Marcus Brutus, though I'm afraid that my figures are not as beautifully done as his (top job, MB!).

As I need two armies for RCW battles, one of them has blue shields and the other red. I just use plain shields because I'm not a good enough painter to do 600 patterns neatly (but I'll pretend that it's because I'm waiting for consensus on which pattern is most authentic…).

Caesarians are (relatively speaking) fun to paint, so enjoy :)

Cheers,
Aaron

White is the base colour of what may be the earliest surviving colour depiction of a Roman shield pattern, perhaps c.100 BC: see TMP link

There are what look to be plain white scuta on the (very faded) fresco from the tomb of the Statilii on the Esquiline – link (not sure about the 3rd century date, if correct it means it's earlier than the Praeneste example, but it might be later).

There's also a tomb-painting that D'Amato has used, but I can't recall at the moment where it's from, showing a 1st century BC hunting scene in which a soldier has a yellow scutum with a blue rim.

Thanks for the ideas. The link from a previous discussion that GurKhan posted was also useful.