St Rosalia

"St. Rosalia" by Anthony Van Dyck

“Saint Rosalia Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo,” by Anthony van Dyck, made during the artist’s time in quarantine, is itself quarantined, in its assigned place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The commemoration of the museum’s 150th birthday, due to have opened a few weeks ago, has been postponed because of the coronavirus. It’s springtime, the year is 1624, and the 25-year-old Anthony van Dyck is sailing south, to Sicily, where he has been invited to paint the island’s Spanish viceroy. Van Dyck is establishing his international career as a portraitist to the rich and famous, and he has already had some success in Genoa, London and his hometown, Antwerp. Now, in Palermo, he feels on the cusp of a breakthrough. He gets the portrait done that spring, but then: disaster. On May 7, 1624, Palermo reports the first cases of a plague that will soon kill more than 10,000, some 10 percent of the city’s population. On June 25, the viceroy whom van Dyck painted declares a state of emergency; five weeks later, he’s dead. Quarantined in a foreign city, the young Fleming watches in horror as the port closes, the city gates slam shut, the hospital overflows, the afflicted groan in the street.

St Rosalia complete with its frame at the Met in New York.

As the emergency wears on, a gang of Franciscans starts digging up the earth on a hill facing the harbor. In a cave they unearth a pile of bones, which, the archbishop’s commission determines, belongs to Saint Rosalia, a noblewoman of centuries past. Rosalia’s relics are paraded through the city as the epidemic abates, and the grateful citizens worship her as the santuzza, the “little saint,” who saved the city. Rosalia is proclaimed, and remains today, the patron saint of Palermo. Van Dyck — meeting the new demand, and not a little grateful himself — takes a half-finished self-portrait, slathers it with primer and paints the new protectress, floating gloriously over the illness-ravaged port town. Painted almost 400 years ago and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it is one of five surviving pictures of St. Rosalia made during van Dyck’s days in quarantine. It was, in fact, one of the Met’s very first acquisitions, bought a year after the museum’s founding in 1870. Now, of course, Rosalia is quarantined herself as the coronavirus pandemic intensifies. The Met does not expect to open before July.