Leading lady or dress extra? - the so-called reliquary of Saint Balbina, South Netherlandish, circa 1520-30

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Balbina of Rome, sometimes called Saint Balbina and Balbina the Virgin is venerated as a virgin martyr and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. As so often with early Christian history, her story is a bit of a muddle. She was the daughter of Quirinus, a Tribune in the Roman Army, who was later arrested as a Christian and martyred - beheaded - in 116. What happened to his daughter after his death is unclear, but some accounts tell of her as living as a virgin recluse nun until her own death; an alternate account has her arrested along with her father, and dispatched in the same manner. The general consensus is that in 130 she was found guilty of being a Christian and sentenced to death by Emperor Hadrian. Whether she was drowned or buried alive is a matter of dispute among historians. After her death, she was buried next to her father in the catacomb of Praetextatus on the Via Appia. At a later date, the bones and relics of father and daughter were brought to a church built in her honor in the fourth century, the extant Basilica of Santa Balbina. At some point in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, her skull was removed from her body and placed inside an ornate reliquary which now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Or....

In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the wooden bust is known as a reliquary of Saint Balbina but, more likely, it was intended to represent one of the companions of Saint Ursula. The legend of Saint Ursula tells that she was an English princess who decided to take a pre-nuptial holy pilgrimage, accompanied by eleven thousand virgin companions. The great virginal throng travelled to Cologne, Basel, and Rome and, on their return trip through Cologne, they were met by a group of pagan Huns, the leader of whom wanted to marry Ursula; she understandably refused. And so the Huns murdered all eleven thousand of the maidens. The legend appears to have become incredibly popular somewhere around the tenth century, the thought of such a vast number of girl martyrs being decidedly inspirational to religious fervor. But the number that went down in legend was probably a misunderstanding of a Latin numerical inscription which read not eleven thousand, but just eleven. 

The "hatch" at the top of the bust.

From the Met's inventory description:

Medieval reliquaries often took the form of the body parts they were created to contain. Bust reliquaries for the skulls of saints were placed on or near altars and, by the late Middle Ages, were assembled in large numbers in some church sanctuaries, from Cologne in the north to Ubeda in southern Spain. [...] On particular feast days, such busts could be carried in processions.

The fact that the Met, alone, has two other very similar reliquaries in its collection, suggests that this remarkable object probably isn't actually connected to the historical figure known as Saint Balbina.