Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome, Benedict, Mary Magdalene and Justina

A painting like this was a set of instructions as much as a devotion, and the instructions are written in its saints. Around 1515 Diana gathered four of them about the enthroned Virgin and Child: Jerome and Mary Magdalene, the great penitents, and beside them Benedict, founder of Western monasticism, with Justina of Padua. That last pairing is the clue. Benedict and Justina together were the badge of the reformed Benedictine congregation whose mother house was Santa Giustina in Padua, so the altarpiece was very likely painted for a church of that order. It is a late work, made when Diana had been at his trade for some 30 years, and it keeps faith with the calm, symmetrical sacred conversation he had used all his life. Justina carries the martyr's palm, the plainest label of the four.