Bits and pieces.

In keeping with the Roman tombstone blog of a couple of weeks ago I'd like to share some work I did a while back concerning a reconstruction of a Roman auxiliary cavalry helmet.  It wasn't done for anything in particular, except that I find such things interesting and like to study them.

In the UK we have a rich historical past and that means plenty of archaeology that needs intricate study in the labs of museums up and down the country, and plenty more still in the ground just waiting to be discovered.  Recently a couple of Roman cavalry helmets have come to light in Britain and I have concentrated on a helmet found in a place called Hallaton in Leicestershire.

A cavalry sports helmet found at Ribchester in Lancashire in 1796.  It would originally have been silvered.  Wikipedia commons.

It was found in 2000 through the efforts of Ken Wallace, a member of the Hallaton field walking group, and the pieces were dug out of the ground still in blocks of earth and spent the next nine years at the British Museum where they were conserved.  The helmet is now on permanent display at the Harborough museum in Market Harborough.

The Hallaton helmet in Harborough museum.  Wikipedia commons

It's of a type called a 'cavalry sports helmet' quite a number of which have been discovered around the Roman world, and would have been used in ceremonial events and in certain kinds of military sports displays.  Probably manufactured in the early 1st century AD it is made of sheets of iron, and would have originally been given a silvered surface, and  been covered with extensive embossed decoration.  Some of this detail has survived, but a lot was badly damaged so part of the game here is to closely scrutinise photographs taken when the helmet was still covered in dirt and see if something can be made of them.

Hallaton helmet cheek guard showing detail of mounted officer with a winged victory.  Wikipedia commons/the author

One of the cheek guards, the left one, was in a reasonable state of preservation and a figure of a general or possibly an emperor can be seen in the typical formulaic Roman manner, riding a horse over the prone body of a barbarian.  This was fairly easy to visualise as most of it was still there, but the front of the crown of the helmet was a sad ruin.  Something of a female head and shoulders portrait can be made out just above the face of the wearer, but most of the top of the head and face of this portrait is missing.

The female portrait at the front of the helmet.  Probably a Roman goddess or local deity.  Wikipedia commons.

As this is very badly eroded only the general sense of the original can be gleaned from study of photographs. So a certain amount of speculation has to be indulged in, and a certain amount of  - yes invention.  The portrait is probably of a Roman goddess possibly Victory, or a local deity.  We all know more or less what a Roman/Greek goddess looks like where statues are concerned.  I'm sure the ancient Romans/Greeks could tell the difference pretty easily, and professors of Roman/Greek history can properly lecture on the ways and means of telling them apart, but to most of us they are fairly similar in look.

And of course all we have to work with here is a head and shoulders. On very close examination you can just make out that she has some plaits of hair hanging at each side of the head, and is wearing some kind of tunic, the creases of which are still just visible.  On either side of the portrait are two lions with prey, in the above image you can just make out the head of a ram on the left of the picture.  These things are heavily eroded and again much imagination was needed to realise these figures, but my own scrutiny of the photographs lead me to believe that the lion is lying down and not on it's haunches as I've seen in other reconstructions.  However they are the experts and have actual access to the real helmet so I'm happy to concede that I am probably wrong. 

So here is my two penn'uth, and it's about as close as I can get without actually seeing the real helmet.  Why did I bother?  As an exercise in drawing and understanding, all part of an artist/illustrators work. 

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Flight ready

I swore the arms would be done this week, and they are, just about.  All flight systems are on line and she's taxiing on to the runway - well, hopping would probably be a better description.  Hopping because she has legs and feet, as well as arms.  And as you can see from the picture at the top of the page, she has eyes as well.

As usual I began the arms on a separate layer, which was just as well as I've had to cut them up, and rotate them, and bits of them, and move them slightly back and forth over the shoulder region trying to decide what looked right.  And rub out parts of them and redraw and repaint gaps, and cut areas and generally curse and swear.  Was it worth it?  Hmmm, that's debatable.

As I said last week, I decided to have her holding a box instead of a scroll, because I thought that a scroll of the type I envisaged would be awkward and would obscure parts of the arms and chest of the bird.  And you have to be able to see that she's a bird with arms.  Both arms would also have to be pretty extended so I could show that she was unrolling a large scroll.  My sketches weren't promising.

Arms above the basic lines.  Note the gap at the right elbow where I cut it and rotated the forearm.

Above you can see the underlying lines with the arms placed over them.  They don't look right of course, and I've had to pay attention to the left arm, shortening it at the elbow and darkening it for shadow.  But the arms aren't to my liking.  I mess about with the shape of them, redrawing and colouring but I don't really improve them.  They look like a dolls arms, and even though this is an arch fantasy subject it should still look as real as that allows.

Seeing the arms with the rest of the colour layers.  Still no hands.

The box is now in place as well, and its position has migrated around the image by millimetres while I tried to finalise the arms placement.  I've also darkened the feathers just under the arms.  Then began to apply myself to the tricky problem of hands.  I didn't want to spend forever on the web looking for references, as that task can be endless.  You always think that if you look a bit harder you'll find the perfect image, and end up with masses, only to find when trying to use them that they don't really match with what you intended anyway.  But that means trying to 'busk' your way through it.

First hand in, and look at that box - it's slipped down the layer tree so its now under the hair!  I'll have to drag it up again.

Well, the first hand is in, and I'm not overwhelmed by the result, but soldier on anyway.  I manage to make a slightly better hand for the other arm that covers the box, but neither is brilliant.

The finished arms.  That box is a bit plain, it could do with some hieroglyphics or something.

And the legs, which I haven't really shown much of, are finished with scales toes and claws, and it's about this stage that I begin (in fact quite a while ago) to see how funny the thing is.  And that's the genius of those Egyptian painters that they could with a brush and some papyrus quickly and deftly depict this strange being and make it cool and attractive but not funny. 

The finished Ba bird - with added shadow.  Hah ha - sparrowlegs!

  And that's a lesson about approach and style more than anything else; those ancient artists needed images for a single well - defined purpose, to depict a mystic being in the papyruses of the Book of the Dead.  They needed to be quick, clean and easily identifiable.  They had the advantage of having to conform to a particular style, the flat side - on look of the Egyptians, and the images were small, so much so in fact that it's often difficult to see if it's male or female.  Simple, quick, clean.

So there it is.  The trouble with too many Ba birds is that the feathers get up your nose.  Something else for next week I think. 

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