La Vierge du Rosaire

Van Dyck was 25 when he sailed to Palermo in 1624 to paint the Spanish viceroy, and then the plague arrived. It raged for two years and killed something like a quarter of the city. In the middle of it the Dominicans of this oratory commissioned him to paint their Madonna of the Rosary, and he gathered the usual saints around her, but he also gave a place to Rosalia, a medieval hermit whose bones had just been rediscovered on the mountain above the city and carried through the streets as the plague began to lift. Van Dyck fled the outbreak himself and finished the altarpiece back in Genoa, shipping it to Palermo in 1628. Rosalia has been the city's protector ever since.