Saint Helena

Saint Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, is shown holding the True Cross, the relic she was believed to have discovered in the Holy Land, which made her one of the most venerated female saints of the later Middle Ages. Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano was a leading light of the Venetian landscape tradition, and here he sets the monumental, calmly monumental figure against a deep and luminous countryside that opens onto distant hills. This devotional panel, painted about 1495, exemplifies the serene lyricism that carried Venetian painting from the generation of Bellini into the sixteenth century.