Virgin of Humility (left) and Saint Jerome Translating the Gospel of John (right)

Benedetto di Bindo's diptych Virgin of Humility and Saint Jerome Translating the Gospel of John, dated around 1400 and now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, offers a rare pairing of a Marian devotional image with a scholarly one. The Virgin of Humility — depicted seated on the ground or a low cushion rather than an enthroned throne — was a specifically Franciscan-influenced devotional type that emphasized Mary's human modesty alongside her divine motherhood. Saint Jerome, the great translator of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), was the patron saint of scholarship and translation. Benedetto di Bindo was a Sienese painter, and these panels reflect the refined late Gothic style of Siena in the first years of the fifteenth century.

Benedetto di Bindo uses the gold ground and clear, pale color palette of the late Sienese Gothic. The Virgin of Humility is modeled with particular tenderness in the relationship between mother and child. Saint Jerome's study is rendered with miniature-like attention to the books and writing implements surrounding him.