Although the use of wax sculpture for funerary purposes can be traced back to Antiquity, the fabrication of wax reliquaries for catacomb martyrs does not appear to have emerged before the late eighteenth century in Italy. The earliest were designed by Italian surgeon-artisans whose main occupation was the production of anatomical models for use in medical studies. This presentation will focus on the teenage martyr Philomena, who was believed to have been put to death during the Great Persecutions. Discovered in the catacomb of St Priscilla beneath Rome on 24 May 1802, Philomena’s bodily relics were inserted in a lifelike wax facsimile in 1805, and translated to Mugnano del Cardinale, a small town in Campania, where her newly created shrine was patronized by the king and queen of Naples. There in 1835, the nun Pauline Jaricot, founder of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith and the Association of the Living Rosary, was cured of her serious heart condition during a pilgrimage to the saint. After her unexpected recovery, Jaricot brought home a sliver of the martyr’s relics encased in a second full-body wax figure. She took the wax reliquary to Ars, France, where Philomena became the center of a large cult overseen by the curé Jean-Marie Vianney. Bonnie Effros will measure the attraction for the faithful of lifelike wax reliquaries of ancient catacomb martyrs like Philomena, and draw attention to the uncanny parallels between these devotional objects and spectacular displays in nineteenth-century wax museums. She will also explore the reasons for contemporary enthusiasm for these lifelike holy replicas and ask why, despite the improbable existence of two lifelike models of Philomena in southern Italy and southern France, they bolstered rather than diminished the fervor that surrounded the cult of her relics in the nineteenth century.