Born in in Antwerp in 1599, Anthony Van Dyck moved to Italy in 1622. He traveled to Palermo, Sicily, in spring of 1624 to paint a commissioned portrait of Viceroy Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy. Within months of his arrival, an outbreak of the bubonic plague occurred there and killed tens of thousands of Sicilians, including Filiberto. Van Dyck was forced to remain quarantined on the island until the autumn of 1625. The most significant paintings that the artist produced in the year and a half that he lived in Palermo are images of Rosalie, the city’s patron saint, whose remains were found in the mountains outside the city in the summer of 1624. From the moment of their discovery, Rosalie’s relics were believed to provide a miraculous cure for the plague, and the saint was subsequently venerated as the protector of Palermo. Van Dyke pictures Rosalie as a young, beautiful woman with flowing hair, wearing a brown monastic dress. Angels deliver a crown of roses, a reference to her name, and a white lily, a symbol of her virginity. At her feet lie a book and skull, the traditional attributes of a hermit saint. Rosalie kneels and looks up toward the heavens. With her right hand she gestures toward the unseen city of Palermo and the plague-stricken citizens for whom she prays. A smaller rendering of the same subject, now in the collection of the Apsley House, London, is thought to be a preparatory version for the Menil’s painting.
