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This contribution deals with four mural paintings of the True Cross legend in the Santa Croce church of the laura of Andria, near Bari [Fig. 1].1 In 1934, Bruno Molajoli was the first to mention a heavily damaged mural cycle in the Santa Croce of Andria.2 Alba Medea subsequently included his discovery in the catalogue Gli affreschi delle cripte eremitiche pugliesi (1939).3 The cycle is mentioned by Marisa Milella in Andar per mare. Puglia e Mediterraneo tra mito e storia (1998).4 Mariella Basile Bonsante uses these data as a starting point for her article in Stella Calò Mariani's // cammino di Gerusalemme, the proceedings of a conference in Bari, published in 2002.5 Nonetheless, the importance of these mural paintings for the diffusion of the theme of the Legend of the True Cross in Mediterranean Italy, and their function in the context of the Apulian cripte eremitiche, have so far been neglected.6
The Legend of the Finding of the Cross: Andria and its Iconographie Tradition
The legend of the finding of the Cross arose at the end of the fourth century.7 Initially, it was a collection of brief patristic testimonies. In his De obitu Theodosii (395), Ambrose mentions how Helen went to Jerusalem at the request of her son Constantine - an example for the deceased emperor Theodosius for whom the eulogy was written. With the aid of the Holy Spirit, she recovered Christ's Cross on Mount Golgotha. A few years earlier, Chrysostom had already referred to the relic of the Cross (eightyfifth Homily on the Gospel of John, 390), but he did not associate it with Helen. Paulinus of Nola (402) and Rufinus (403) both mention Helen's role in the recovery of the relic, and say, respectively, she was helped by the Jews and the local bishop Macarius. The true Cross could be distinguished from two other crosses by the resurrection of a dead woman or man.
These brief patristic references are developed further in an anonymous variant, the legend of Judas Cyriacus, which has it that the Jew Judas revealed the location of the Cross under pressure from Helen. After seven days of starvation in a driedout well, he gave in and told her the secret that he had heard from his forefathers a...