St Martina

Martina of Rome was a Roman martyr under emperor Alexander Severus. A patron saint of Rome, she was martyred in 228, under the pontificate of Pope Urban I.

The reclining statue of the saint was made by Niccolò Menghini in 1635 and placed under the altar in the church Santi Luca e Martina in Rome. Reconstruction of the church took place following the discovery of the saint's relics. Pietro da Cortona was the architect of the reconstruction and probably he also provided the drawing for the sculpture.

Inspired by the statue of St Cecilia by Stefano Maderno and other seventeenth-century images of martyrs, the young saint is depicted after the torture, with the head, severed from the body, resting on an urn and unperturbed expression of the face.

The sculpture is critically linked to the Post-Tridentine interest in the relics of early Christian martyrs. The disjunction between the sculpture's severed head and seemingly living body reinforces the authority of Pietro da Cortona's 1634 discovery of St Martina's relics beneath the old Church of Santi Luca e Martina. The detached and moveable head (rarely seen in early modern sculpture) evokes associations with cephalophory and inventively implies that St Martina was somehow miraculously involved in the recovery of her own relics.