Coronación de Santa Rosalía

The Christ Child leans down to crown a kneeling young woman in a rich brocade mantle. Van Dyck had first painted Saint Rosalia while trapped by plague in Palermo. This 1629 canvas was his last picture of her.

The story behind the painting

Van Dyck painted The Coronation of Saint Rosalia in 1629 for the chapel of the Fraternity of senior bachelors in Antwerp's Jesuit church, then Saint Ignatius, later Saint Charles Borromeo. The chapel held relics of the saint, sent to Antwerp by the Jesuits during a plague in 1626, since Rosalia was invoked against the plague. Van Dyck had painted her five times while trapped in Palermo during a plague in 1624 and 1625. He was himself a member of the fraternity and worked for a relatively low fee.

What to look for

The Virgin and Child sit between Saint Paul, with his sword, and Saint Peter, with his keys. The Christ Child crowns Rosalia, who kneels. Her rich brocaded mantle is unprecedented in earlier Flemish images of the saint, which usually showed her alone in a poor, Franciscan-like habit. Look for her attributes, the skull, the lily and the roses. The lilies and roses are woven into the crown, carried in a basket by the figure at the far right, and held by cherubs in the top right corner.

Meaning and intent

Van Dyck drew themes and details from prints after Sicilian works. The crowning follows an engraving in the Jesuit Giordano Cascini's 1627 life of the saint, itself derived from a lost 1494 painting by Tommaso De Vigilia. The royal clothing may echo a painting by Riccardo Quartararo. But the composition and style come from Venice, a decisive influence on van Dyck: the bright colours and the diagonal of Madonna, Child and saint closely follow Veronese's 1575 Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, and the basket bearer probably quotes Titian's Salome.

Legacy

The Jesuits hoped to spread Rosalia's cult beyond Sicily through the great trading cities of the Spanish Netherlands. In Ypres they commissioned Gaspar de Crayer's own Coronation of Saint Rosalia in 1644, heavily influenced by Paulus Pontius's print after van Dyck's version. The painting and its companion, The Vision of the Blessed Hermann Joseph of 1630, stayed in the Antwerp chapel until 1776, when Empress Maria Theresa acquired both and took them to Vienna. Both now hang in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.