The Finding of the True Cross

Saint Helena, born Flavia Julia Helena (c. 236⁄8-330), married the Emperor Constantius I Chlorus and was the mother of the future Emperor Constantine. Rejected by her husband, she was called to Byzantium by her son after he became Emperor in 306 and after his conversion to Christianity herself became a Christian. As an octogenarian in 326-8 she made a prolonged pilgrimage to Jerusalem. This panel depicts the climax of the pilgrimage when Helena instructed men to excavate under a heathen temple to Venus: they found three crosses, one of which revived a sick woman and was recognised by Helena as the True Cross. She initiated the foundation of the Holy Sepulchre on the site. The life of Saint Helena was celebrated in a number of Tuscan cities, including Florence, Siena and Volterra, in the trecento and was especially favoured by the Franciscan order. The same episode and two others from the saint’s pilgrimage were selected for the great series of frescoes of the story of the True Cross by Piero della Francesca of 1452-66 in San Francesco at Arezzo. Cozzarelli was not influenced by these, but he may nonetheless have been aware of them, as his master, Matteo di Giovanni, like Piero, had been born in Borgo San Sepolcro and received commissions there.

Cozzarelli shows only one cross, presumably the first to be found. The setting, with its triumphal arch and other buildings, was evidently intended to represent Jerusalem. A companion panel from the same predella, formerly owned by Sir Thomas Barlow and sold most recently by Finarte, Milan, on19 June 1996 (lot 53), shows the subsequent episode in which Saint Helena arranged for the Cross to be tested by bringing it to a sick woman, who was revived, and the Empress therefore recognised it as the True Cross. The altarpiece to which the two panels belonged was probably intended for a Franciscan context.