Madonna of the Rosary

Van Dyck came to Palermo in the spring of 1624 to paint the Spanish viceroy. Plague reached the city in May, and by August the viceroy had died of it. This small canvas belongs to those months, and the gallery catalogues it as attributed to van Dyck rather than certainly his. It hung in the church of Santa Caterina, where the enclosed nuns said the rosary in front of it, until 28 November 1922, when the state fund that owned the church ordered the prioress to hand it over to the regional gallery at Palazzo Abatellis. The transfer was written down as a temporary deposit and lasted more than a century. The picture went back to Santa Caterina on 23 December 2025, once the church's marble floor had been restored, and it now returns there for two fixed stretches of the year while the gallery and the church argue about where it should stay.