La peste, una santa, una pittora. L'ultima Rosalia e la seconda volta di Van Dyck a Palermo

The dating of Antoon van Dyck’s Saint Rosalia in Glory Interceding for Palermo (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is here reconsidered in light of its innovative iconography, which departs from traditional models, and of a newly Venetian-oriented chromatic language. The Flemish painter is hypothesised to have returned to Palermo for a second stay, four years after his departure, and to have executed the Metropolitan painting on that occasion. This proposal is supported by recent findings concerning the correct transcription of the date of van Dyck’s meeting with Sofonisba Anguissola in Palermo on 12 July 1629, as clarified by Carla Rossi’s documentary reassessment. Read within this revised chronological framework, the work emerges as the product of a renewed encounter between the artist and the devotional climate of the city, shaped by the memory of the plague and by the consolidation of the cult of Saint Rosalia.