Niccolò Menghini’s marble sculpture of Santa Martina (ca. 1635) in the Church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome belongs to the seventeenth-century genre of sculpture depicting saints as dead or dying. Until now, scholars have ignored the conceptual and formal concerns of the S. Martina, dismissing it as derivative of Stefano Maderno’s Santa Cecilia (1600). This thesis provides the first thorough examination of Menghini’s S. Martina, arguing that 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 SS. 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. / 2020-09-06