Item: apparently in ancient Rome fighters would take leather straps, line them with iron studs, and wrap them around their fists to make their punches deal more damage
Augustus of Prima Porta (1st Century) and the reconstruction of its original colors.
Emma Zahonero and Jesús Mendiola, from the MV Arte Fine Arts and Restoration Workshop, have been in charge of restoring the colors to the Augustus of Prima Porta sculpture, in a laborious process that has lasted exactly three months, without counting the time dedicated to the research and documentation The amazing reconstruction was done in 2014, due to the 2000th anniversary of the first Roman Emperor’s death. The statue of Augustus of Prima Porta is therefore probably the most accurate polychrome recreation of those that have been made to date based on scientific and archaeological investigations. The Augustus of Prima Porta is a statue of Caesar Augustus that was discovered on April 20, 1863 in the Prima Porta villa, belonging to Livia, Augustus’s wife, on the outskirts of Rome.
Both the sculptures and the temples and monuments of the ancient world were not without color as has been believed for centuries. Even today it is hard for us to imagine those statues, columns, obelisks, pyramids and legendary temples, full of color. But they were very colorful; The colors of the statues’ clothing, footwear, skin, and hair were accurately represented. The time made those colors fade. During the Renaissance, a cultural movement in Western Europe, whose idea was to revive Greco-Roman art, wonderful statues without the slightest color were sculpted in marble because they did not know that ancient statues had colors that had disappeared. In these pictures we can see a faithful reconstruction of how the ancient Romans saw one of the famous sculpture that depicts the young Emperor Augustus.
Hollywood has no concept of what 5th century Romans looked like. If I'm watching a movie about the final days of the Western Roman Empire, I should be seeing zero togas. It's like if you made a movie about the Trump administration, you wouldn't have people dressed like the founding fathers. That's how wrong it is.
This is what 5th century Romans looked like:
I think the problem is that pop culture has this theme park version of history that treats time periods like distinct worlds with no fluidity between them. In Roman Times, people dressed like this vs Medieval Times when people dressed like that. But that is obviously not how time works. The end of the Western Roman Empire led directly into and overlapped with the Middle Ages, and the aesthetics we associate with medieval Europe were already long established.
On a related note, the "barbarians" didn't dress like you think they did either. Less of this:
More of this:
(Art by Angus McBride)
Again, the end of the Western Roman Empire was the beginning of medieval Europe, and it already looked like it.
The notable exception was the Franks, who apparently really did dress like that:
There really is an exception to everything, and it's usually the French.