Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague

Saint Rosalie rises above Palermo with her hands open and her face turned towards the light. Around her, children with wings tumble through clouds, point towards the city and bring a wreath of roses. Anthony van Dyck painted this vision during the plague of 1624, when devotion to Rosalie acquired a new urgency. The canvas now in New York also preserves an unexpected earlier image beneath its surface: the young painter's own face. ^{[1] [2]}

Palermo in 1624

Van Dyck was in Palermo when plague brought the Sicilian city under quarantine. The epidemic gave the image of a local saint an immediate public significance. Rosalie, or Rosalia in Italian, was remembered as a twelfth-century hermit. During 1624, remains discovered on Monte Pellegrino above Palermo were identified as hers, and she became the focus of renewed appeals for protection. The identification belongs to the religious history of the discovery: calling the remains Rosalia's relics describes the belief around which devotion gathered. ^{[1] [3]}

The distinction between an existing devotion and its new prominence matters. Rosalia had not been unknown before the epidemic. In the opening of his study of her imagery, Pierfrancesco Palazzotto notes that devotion existed before 1624, even if it had been limited. The discovery transformed its standing. His account also places an official image commissioned by Palermo's Senate in 1624 within this development. Van Dyck was therefore participating in a wider effort to give newly urgent beliefs a visible form. ^[4]

That situation helps explain the painting's combination of recognisable religious language and particular local meaning. An ascending figure borne among clouds would already have been familiar from other sacred paintings. Here, the saint and the city below make the appeal specific. Palermo appears as a place under her protection, while the surrounding angels direct attention between earth and heaven. A person praying before such an image could recognise the city's need without seeing a detailed scene of illness.

The painting does not show the discovery of the relics, a procession through the streets or a documented encounter with a sufferer. It represents intercession: the saint appeals to heaven on behalf of people on earth. This makes it an image of a hoped-for relationship between the afflicted city and its heavenly advocate. The title names the plague-stricken; the composition concentrates on the figure through whom their prayers might be carried upwards. ^[3]

For the painter, Palermo also belonged to the larger experience of his years in Italy . Yet the value of that biographical setting lies here in a particular challenge. Van Dyck was making a sacred image for a subject that had become pressing in the place where he was working. The epidemic connects this picture to an event in the city's life as directly as a named sitter connects one of his portraits to a person.

Following the movement through the picture

Rosalie occupies the tall central space, but her body does not form a rigid vertical. Her face turns upwards and slightly across the painting; her shoulders and open hands keep the pose receptive. The brown habit descends in broad folds, gathered at the waist. Across one side, a warmer, golden-brown mantle opens towards the viewer. Its projecting folds link her sheltered body to the more exposed figures around her.

The colour makes her easy to find without removing her from the atmosphere. The habit is close in tone to the darker clouds, while her face and hands catch the light. Behind her head, pale rays cut through the grey. She seems to emerge into illumination as the cloud bank at the upper right remains heavy and dark. The passage from shadow to light gives her upward gaze a visible destination, although the source of heavenly power remains outside the picture.

Her two hands contribute different movements. The hand on the viewer's left extends down and out, its fingers widely opened. The other rests nearer the body, with the palm turned towards us. Together they make an appeal that spreads beyond the chest and face. The gesture can accommodate both the city below and the unseen presence above. It does not point to one tiny incident that the viewer must locate before understanding the subject.

At the upper left, an angel approaches with the floral wreath. The figure is smaller and more horizontal than Rosalie, and the extended arms carry the action across the bright clouds towards her head. Below, other angels move in several directions. A pale body falls diagonally through the foreground; red drapery curls around another figure at the lower right. At the right edge, an upraised arm interrupts the darkness. These changing angles keep the surrounding space restless.

The effect is easier to appreciate if the picture is considered as a sequence of movements. Begin with the dark lower landscape, follow the crowded figures upwards towards the saint's hands and face, then continue towards the crown entering from the left. The eye can also return down the sloping line of her mantle to the skull and the lower group. Van Dyck provides routes around the figure as well as a clear central focus.

The different scales are equally purposeful. The saint is large enough for her appeal to be read through posture and expression, while Palermo occupies a narrow, distant zone below. The separation gives her protective role a spatial form. The earthly city has become small within a much larger imagined realm, but its presence keeps the picture attached to a particular community.

Roses, a skull and a hermit's habit

The rose wreath gives the saint's name a visible counterpart. Rosalie and Rosalia invite an association with roses, and the flowers also mark the honour bestowed on her in heaven. Walter Liedtke drew attention to that connection in his account of the painting. The wreath approaches her head, so the act of crowning remains part of the picture's unfolding movement. ^[3]

The skull at the left introduces a different register. Its rounded, dark form rests against a living child's body, close to the extended hand and the warm folds of the mantle. A skull belongs to the language of mortality and penitential contemplation. Here, in a picture made for the plague context, it also gives the distant city's danger a compact and unmistakable sign. Liedtke connected it, together with the gestures of the lower putti, to the epidemic of 1624. ^[3]

The skull and flowers sit at opposite points in the composition. One recalls the fragility of human life; the other conveys heavenly recognition. Rosalie's body connects them. Her face is directed above the realm of death, while the open hand nearest the skull brings her appeal close to it. The arrangement allows hope and mortality to occupy the same image without a separate narrative scene for each.

Her brown habit is also meaningful. It places her within the visual world of religious withdrawal and an austere life. Palazzotto's abstract emphasises that early images presented the saint in a brown habit tied with a cord, making her eremitic life visible. Such clothing could also evoke the appearance of established religious orders, which had an interest in the saint's image. ^[4] In Van Dyck's painting, the plain garment remains legible beneath the rich play of light and surrounding colour.

Rosalie should be understood here as a hermit saint. The crown of flowers does not turn her into a martyr. A single attribute can take on different meanings in different images, and its position within the whole subject matters. In this case, the name association, the plain dress, the skull and the view of Palermo work together to identify the city's advocate.

These details make the picture accessible at more than one distance. From across a room, the illuminated face and large central form establish a heavenly vision. At closer range, the objects and gestures give that vision its particular identity. The viewer moves from a broad impression of ascent and light to the more precise relationship between Rosalie and a city facing death.

An image of intercession

Liedtke related this type of Rosalie composition to paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin. The comparison helps explain the clouds, the elevated central figure and the surrounding angels. Van Dyck adapted an established means of representing a passage between earthly and heavenly space to the new prominence of Palermo's saint. ^[3]

The subject remains Rosalie's appeal for the city. Her position in the sky and the angels around her express her heavenly standing. The open hands and upturned face make that standing active: she is shown directing herself towards a power beyond the edge of the canvas. Below, the landscape and the gestures of the smaller figures maintain the connection with Palermo.

The distinction affects how the picture is read. If the eye follows only the main body upwards, it can seem to be a vision of elevation alone. Follow the gestures downwards as well, and the city's need becomes more apparent. Intercession involves that double direction. Rosalie turns towards heaven on behalf of those below; the image allows the viewer's attention to pass between both.

Van Dyck does not fill the foreground with sufferers. Human vulnerability is carried through the skull, the title, the city and the urgent movements of the putti. As a result, Rosalie's face remains the centre of emotional attention. The image offers a figure to address and contemplate during distress. It visualises the hope that Palermo could receive heavenly protection.

This focus also places the work within Van Dyck's broader religious painting . He uses the body's turn, the opening of a hand and the fall of drapery to make an otherwise invisible relation understandable. Here those devices give shape to the belief that a local saint could act as an advocate for her community.

The self-portrait beneath Rosalie

Beneath the finished composition lies a separate, earlier undertaking. Van Dyck had begun a self-portrait on the same canvas. When he used the support for Rosalie, he reversed its orientation: the earlier head appears upside down in the lower part of the present picture. The hidden image consists chiefly of a head, with brief indications of a collar and shoulder. ^[2]

An ordinary X-ray radiograph showed a head beneath the surface, but its details were difficult to disentangle from the painting above. The more revealing image came from neutron activation autoradiography, published in the Metropolitan Museum's 1982 study. In one of the later autoradiographs, the features became sufficiently clear for the authors to identify the young Van Dyck by comparison with his contemporary self-portraits. ^[2]

The finding is unusually intimate because the buried face looks out towards the viewer. In the completed painting, Rosalie's attention is directed away from us and upwards. Underneath, the painter had addressed the person before the canvas more directly. These orientations belong to two different designs, physically superimposed. The hidden face is an abandoned start, rather than a tiny self-portrait inserted as a visible participant in the sacred scene.

It is tempting to attach a story to the reuse. Liedtke suggested that an urgent or unexpected interest in the saint might explain Van Dyck's decision to take up this already sketched canvas. His wording leaves room for uncertainty. ^[3] The reuse itself survives as material evidence; the precise reason for it does not. The canvas cannot tell us whether the painter was responding to a sudden request, changing his priorities or simply choosing a support that was available.

Nor does the discovery mean that an entire finished portrait was sacrificed. What the study recovered is a preliminary painted sketch. Its abbreviated collar and shoulder matter because they show the state of that earlier project. The result adds to the surviving record of Van Dyck's face and working habits, while belonging to the physical history of this particular Rosalie painting. His later self-portraits offer a different opportunity to consider how he deliberately presented himself in completed pictures.

How different pigments separated the images

The two buried designs could be distinguished because Van Dyck used different materials for them. The self-portrait was sketched mainly with bone black. The preliminary Rosalie design was painted mostly in umbers. Neutron activation autoradiography could register those pigments at different stages of the examination, separating information that was difficult to read when combined in a conventional X-ray image. ^[2]

The technique depends on the elemental composition of the paint. Exposure to neutrons temporarily activates certain elements, and films record the radiation they subsequently emit. Because different activated elements decay at different rates, films exposed at different times can reveal different distributions of pigment. The resulting images are records of materials spread across a surface, rather than colour photographs taken through the top paint. ^[2]

For this canvas, manganese associated with umber helped reveal the prepared ground and the Rosalie sketch. A later exposure made the bone-black self-portrait particularly clear. The authors' account explains why the same support could yield such different images. The contrast came from the painter's choices centuries earlier, brought into view through the distinct behaviour of the materials. ^[2]

This also explains why the method complements other forms of examination. X-rays are particularly effective at showing lead-containing paint, including lead white. Autoradiography can make other parts of a composition legible. Neither image automatically provides a complete sequence of every paint layer. The 1982 study explains that paint cross-sections can help establish the depth at which particular applications occur. ^[2]

For a viewer, the most useful consequence is straightforward: the painting has a history of decisions that cannot all be seen from its finished surface. Its brown and black pigments preserve separate beginnings, and their differences allow those beginnings to be recovered. The technical evidence makes Van Dyck's working process unusually tangible without requiring us to invent what he thought at each moment.

A composition that changed as it was painted

Autoradiography revealed changes within the Rosalie design as well as the earlier face. The preliminary sketch was freely indicated in umber. Some outlines changed as the picture developed, and parts of the initial design were not carried into the surface in the same form. The angel who brings the crown at the upper left was absent from that early stage. ^[2]

That omission has a clear consequence for the finished composition. The crown-bearer now occupies a conspicuous place beside the rays of light, bringing the rose wreath towards Rosalie's illuminated head. Adding the figure strengthened the saint's identification and introduced an action into an area that leads the eye towards her face. The study's authors proposed that the addition might reflect the development of her particular imagery. The material finding is the figure's absence from the first design; the reason for adding it remains an interpretation. ^[2]

The examination also made stages of the background visible. After laying out the figures, Van Dyck worked with varied strokes in the light, clouds and distant landscape. He left space for the principal group, while sometimes carrying his background work across parts of the preliminary outlines. The authors noted such an overlap near Rosalie's forehead. Forms were being adjusted as the space around them took shape. ^[2]

Elsewhere, the study suggested reconsidered positions and partially suppressed figures among the angels. Those readings were expressed cautiously, including possible changes to a lower angel's leg and portions of figures at the right. They make the crowded group easier to understand as an arrangement that was worked out through painting. Every limb did not arrive in its final place at the first attempt. ^[2]

The examination also recorded damage to the support. In the third autoradiograph, a jagged blank near the centre corresponds to a substantial loss of canvas; other exposures show the repair. Original canvas had also been reattached near Rosalie's right shoulder. These marks help distinguish the picture's later physical history from the changes Van Dyck made while composing the scene. ^[2]

This evidence changes the meaning of the picture's apparent ease. The final surface presents a continuous celestial space: bodies turn, clouds billow and light passes through the gaps. Underneath, that continuity emerged through adjustments at several stages. The surviving changes connect the polished devotional image to the activity of composing it.

Related versions and the case for priority

The Metropolitan Museum's canvas belongs to a group of closely related Rosalie images. The 1982 study singled out similar paintings in Munich and Madrid when discussing the relationship between versions. Its authors argued that the extensive revisions in New York favoured that picture's priority: an evolving design is more consistent with the development of a composition than with the straightforward repetition of an already settled arrangement. ^[2]

The argument has force because the changes occur at more than one stage. There is an early Rosalie sketch, a background developed around the figures and adjustments within the later paint. The evidence is richer than the isolated movement of a single hand. It records a sequence in which the whole image was still being resolved.

There are limits to what follows. The same authors explicitly stated that comparative autoradiography of the Munich and Madrid paintings could provide further evidence about whether New York served as a prototype. Examination of one canvas cannot, by itself, disclose every stage in the production of the others. It gives a strong reason to take this painting seriously as a place where the design developed. ^[2]

Liedtke also distinguished this elevated Rosalie from another compositional type, in which the saint kneels near her cave above Palermo and appeals for the city. He connected that second form with penitential and ecstatic saint imagery. ^[3] The distinction is useful when encountering other pictures under similar titles: Rosalie's identity and Palermo's predicament recur, while her position, gestures and surroundings can change substantially.

The New York work rewards attention as an individual object. Its size brings the animated group into a relatively compact canvas; its particular disposition of clouds and figures creates the route between the city, the saint and the wreath. Its hidden self-portrait and successive revisions belong to its own material history. Since its purchase in 1871, it has also held a distinctive place among the earliest European paintings acquired by the Metropolitan Museum. ^[1]