New York –
He was handsome, radiant with the confidence of youth; she didn’t have the temperament to take refuge in her place. It was spring 1624 and 25-year-old Anthony van Dyck was sailing south to Sicily, where he was invited to paint the island’s Spanish viceroy. He was establishing his international career as a portraitist for the rich and famous, and had already had some success in Genoa, London and his hometown, Antwerp. Back then, in Palermo, he felt on the cusp of a breakthrough.
Antonhy van Dyck (1599-1641).
He did the portrait that spring, but then: disaster. On May 7, 1624, Palermo reported the first cases of a plague that would soon kill more than 10,000, 10% of the city’s population. On June 25, Viceroy Emanuel Filiberto painted by van Dyck declared a state of emergency; five weeks later, he died. In quarantine in a foreign city, the young man watched in horror as the port was closed, the city gates too, the hospital overflowed, the afflicted moaned in the streets.
As the emergency progressed, a group of Franciscans began excavating the earth on a hill in front of the port. In a cave they unearthed a pile of bones that, according to the archiepiscopal commission, belonged to Santa Rosalía, a noblewoman from past centuries. Her relics paraded through the city as the epidemic abated and grateful citizens worshiped her as the santuzza, the “little saint” who saved the city.
‘Portrait of Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio’, 1623, painted by Van Dyck.
Rosalía was proclaimed, and continues to be today, the patron saint of Palermo. Van Dyck, responding to the new demand, and not ungrateful himself, took a half-finished self-portrait, primed it, and painted the new protector, floating gloriously over the disease-ravaged port city.
Santa Rosalía interceding for those affected by the Palermo plague, painted nearly 400 years ago and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is one of five images of Rosalía that are preserved during Van Dyck’s quarantine days. In fact, it was one of the Met’s first acquisitions, bought a year after the museum was founded in 1870. Van Dyck’s image of the plague can be seen in the first gallery of the exhibition. Making the Met: 1870-2020. It is the centerpiece of the museum’s 150th anniversary celebrations.
The artist also painted ‘Portrait of Maria de Medici’, 1631.
The NYT chatted (this note was written in March of this year and certain paragraphs were edited for an update regarding COVID) in the midst of the pandemic with Max Hollein, the director of the Met, and Quincy Houghton, its deputy director of exhibitions. It was a sad visit. In the Great Hall, the large urns are devoid of their usual huge bouquets of fresh flowers. A group of skeletal guards were stationed at the tables, accompanied by industrial-size jugs of hand sanitizer. The lights in many galleries were off, the gift shop doors closed. Sometimes being in an empty museum excites me, but this closed Met, with no audience, left me miserable.
‘Self-portrait’ from 1613–1614.
Rosalía, however, is already in her assigned place to Making the Met, which was almost installed before work was stopped in mid-March 2020. At first glance, he appears to be ascending to heaven with the help of nearly a dozen cherubs, and a shaft of light illuminates his ruddy face through the dark clouds at the top of the painting. I spent a while examining her light coloring, her Titanic brushstroke; This is one of the most Italian paintings by the Flemish artist.
It is a misleading painting. Looking at her quickly and easily you could mistake this for an Assumption of the Virgin, and in fact, the saint was misidentified when the Met purchased the image during its first year in business. (Making the Met it also includes an 1881 painting of the museum’s first location on 14th Street, with the mislabeled Rosalía clearly visible). The confusion was understandable outside of Sicily. Unlike Peter with her keys or Catherine with her wheel, this little-known saint did not have a standard set of attributes until the plague struck.
Our upstart Flemish therefore had to invent an iconography for the woman who stopped the epidemic. Van Dyck decided to imagine Rosalia as a young woman with long, blond curly hair, flushed cheeks, and eyes wide with ecstasy. Beneath it, energetically sketched in an ocher and green color palette, is the port of Palermo, and in the background is Monte Pellegrino, the hill where his relics were found. “
The artist gave one of the putti (cherubs) advancing towards her, a wreath of pink and white roses, a reference to the name of the saint. Another, in the lower left, is kicking a human skull: the skull of Rosalía herself, who paraded through the quarantined city almost as soon as she left the ground. It seems certain that van Dyck witnessed the first of these processions in a closed Palermo, but that it still takes place every July, and that they are as baroque as one of the artist’s altarpieces. The Festino di Santa Rosalia remains one of the biggest festivals in Italy, a mix of the sacred and the secular, with rock concerts and pasta tastings mixed with prayer.
Portrait of Emanuel Filiberto, Prince of Savoy, 1624, by Van Dyck.
For New Yorkers garrisoned in their homes and apartments, or for doctors and nurses scrambling for masks, pleading with a saint to end an epidemic may not seem like enough. However, curator Xavier F. Salomon, who organized an exhibition in 2012 on van Dyck’s stay in Sicily (and is now the chief curator of the Frick Collection), has shown that the rulers of Palermo, a city ravaged by the plague, relied on medical and religious interventions to stop the contagion. Palermitans could pray to Rosalía’s remains in the city’s cathedral, but only while observing strict social distancing: she could visit only one day a week, determined by her address.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-BORUK56sw
An edict proclaimed that while the city must pray for “the intercession of the glorious Santa Rosalía,” nonetheless, “human instruments and industry should not be neglected.” That included strict limits on movement and a regular record of the sick and the dead. The sick had to isolate themselves on pain of excommunication and worse; the archbishop warned that “they will be cursed with Lucifer, and Judas and all the demons in hell.”
The young van Dyck, who could have relied on his royal connections to get out, stayed through it all. He found, amid the pestilence, a more pressing subject than the courtly portraits that would eventually make his name. What could a painter, and also a foreigner, offer to this city? Much more than an image to pray before. Having endured a quarantine that closed his international career, having survived an epidemic that could have cost him his life, van Dyck produced in Palermo an incarnation of charity in chaos. The pests are random. They are ruthless. Now we are learning that they are scarier because of their uncertain duration. However, Rosalía, floating over Sicily like a hot air balloon, promises that the horror of the epidemic will finally disappear and normality will return.
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