Discovery and Proof of the True Cross

Piero painted this on the walls of a church in Arezzo through the 1450s, the years when news came that Constantinople had fallen to the Ottomans. The old Christian East was gone, and the idea of the Holy Land, of the Cross lost and recovered, was suddenly current again. The scene tells a legend from that world: the empress Helena, mother of Constantine, has come to Jerusalem to find the wood of the True Cross. On the left, three crosses are dug from a field outside the city walls. On the right, the real one is known because touching it brings a dead man back to life, and the onlookers kneel as he sits up. Piero sets all of it under the same calm, even morning light that fills every panel of the cycle.