Bibiana of Rome

Her passion, written late, makes her the daughter of martyrs under Julian the Apostate: the father exiled and dead, the mother beheaded, the sister Demetria fallen dead of shock, and Bibiana entrusted to a woman charged with corrupting her, who failed. Bound to a column and scourged to death with leaded thongs, she is said to have lain two days unburied before a priest laid her in the ground. Historians retain nothing of this account, but the church is real enough: it has stood since the fifth century on the Esquiline. In 1624 Urban VIII had it restored and gave the statue of its titular to a sculptor of twenty-six, Gian Lorenzo Bernini — his first saint, the column of martyrdom at her side, and the piece in which his manner is seen being born.