Oratorio del Rosario di San Domenico

Almost everything in the Oratory of the Rosary leads the eye to the altar, where Anthony van Dyck's Madonna of the Rosary looks down over the room. The young Flemish painter arrived in Palermo in 1624 and took the commission from the confraternity that met here. That same year plague broke out in the city, and among the saints gathered around the Virgin he placed Saint Rosalia, Palermo's patron, whose remains had just been found on Monte Pellegrino. Van Dyck left Sicily, finished the canvas in Genoa and sent it back around 1628.

The Company of the Rosary had founded its oratory beside the church of San Domenico in 1574 and kept enriching it for well over a century. Along the walls hang paintings of the Mysteries of the Rosary by several hands, among them Pietro Novelli, the leading Palermo painter of the day, and Matthias Stom, a Dutch follower of Caravaggio.

Around them, between about 1714 and 1717, the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta covered the walls with white stucco, setting allegorical figures of the Virtues beside the paintings and filling the cornices with putti, the plump child-angels that recur across his oratories in Palermo.