Le Couronnement de sainte Rosalie

In the summer of 1624 Anthony van Dyck was in Palermo, in Sicily, when plague shut the city down and trapped him there. During that same outbreak the bones of Rosalia, a medieval hermit, were discovered on a mountain above the city, and when the dying slowed she was credited with saving Palermo and made its patron saint. Van Dyck painted her several times in that quarantined city. This version came years later, in 1629, after he was back home in Antwerp, made for a chapel in the Jesuit church there. It was the last time he took up the subject. He shows Rosalia lifted into heaven and crowned by Christ, with the Virgin beside the throne.