Statue of St. Helena

Also in the niches of the four great piers beneath the dome, Saint Helena stands diagonally opposite from Saint Longinus. If Longinus is a storm, she is a warship—the kind of woman who makes you feel like you should probably step aside. She is the mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, the behind-the-scenes architect of the 4th-century “Christianization of the Empire” that changed the world’s direction, and art history’s most underrated female archaeologist.

In 326 CE, this woman—already well past seventy, the emperor’s mother and effectively the most powerful woman in the entire empire—decided to travel alone to Jerusalem on an “archaeological pilgrimage.” She excavated sites from the scriptures, and her most sensational discovery came at Golgotha, the traditional site of the crucifixion: records state she unearthed three wooden crosses there, along with the plaque used to mark Jesus’s body (inscribed in Latin, Hebrew, and Greek: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”). Then came the problem: which of the three was the True Cross? According to the account, they had a dying woman touch all three; when she touched the third one, she was revived. That was the True Cross.

Bolgi’s statue captures Helena’s triumphant return, holding that enormous fragment of the Cross. But look closely at the skirt of this sculpture—the marble robe is carved as if torn from within and whipped upward by a massive gust of wind; the surging wave of the hem approaches the edge of 20th-century abstract sculpture. Bolgi was Bernini’s most outstanding and most difficult student, and he worked on this piece for nearly ten years. What he wanted was not a pious old woman, but the embodiment of Roman imperial will—a hurricane walking into history.

The fragments of the True Cross discovered by Helena were distributed to churches around the world as top-tier relics. The fragment she personally witnessed and brought to her son is said to be enshrined in the sealed balcony directly above this statue—in the same row of niches as Saint Longinus’s skull. Four pillars, each with a saint below, each saint standing beneath a relic enshrined above their head. The design of this basilica is a theological statement written entirely in the grammar of architecture.

In 330 CE, when Constantine moved the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople, today’s Istanbul), Helena’s name was immediately inscribed into the city’s founding legend. It is said that the original boundary of Constantinople was drawn by Constantine personally drag-marking a spear through the ground, but after a long circuit, when his attendants asked how far they would walk, he replied: “Until the one walking ahead of me stops.” He looked up—there was no one there. But he continued until the boundary was complete. A mother’s influence sometimes works exactly like this: you think you’re walking alone, but the shadow you’re following has always been hers.

ArtBuddy Interactive Challenge: Look at the massive cross in her hands. Can you find in this marble statue that imperial “I came, I saw, I excavated” determination in her gaze?