page_title: Coronation of Saint Rosalia
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Coronation of Saint Rosalia / History
caption_attribution_description: Italiano: Santa Rosalia incoronata
context_page_description: The Coronation of Saint Rosalia or Madonna and Child with Saints Rosalia, Peter and Paul is a 1629 oil on canvas painting by Anthony van Dyck.
  It and the compositionally-similar The Vision of the Blessed Hermann Joseph were both produced for the chapel of the Confraternity of the Celibates in Antwerp's Jesuit church, Saint Ignatius. They remained there until 1776, when archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria acquired them, taking them to Vienna, where they both now hang in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
context_section_description: It was the last painting the artist produced of Saint Rosalia and - with Saint Rosalia Interceding for the City of Palermo (also 1629) - represented a return to a subject of whom he had produced five paintings whilst trapped in her home city of Palermo during a plague in late 1624 and early 1625. The chapel in which it was to hang housed relics of the saint sent to the city by the Jesuits during a plague there in 1626 in the hope of spreading her cult beyond Sicily via major trading cities in the Spanish Netherlands - she was invoked against plague. They also tried to spread her cult from their church in Ypres, for which they commissioned Gaspar de Crayer's Coronation of Saint Rosalia (Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent) in 1644, a work heavily influence by Paulus Pontius's print of van Dyck's version of the subject.
  The Jesuits had been particularly active in promoting Saint Rosalia's cult in Sicily and beyond and one of their number had produced her first hagiography in 1627, entitled Vitae Sanctae Rosaliae, Virginis Panormitanae e tabulis, situ ac vetustate obsitis e saxis ex antris e rudieribus caeca olim oblivione consepultis et nuper in lucem. Van Dyck was given the commission partly because he was himself a member of the Confraternity, though he did accept a fee relatively low considering his fame at the time, and partly due to his six earlier works showing the saint.
  Van Dyck may have met Cascini and the other Palermo Jesuits in 1624–1625, another possible reason for the commission. He was also already producing drawings of the saint for engravings in Vita S.Rosaliae Virginis Panormitanae Pestis patronae iconibus expressa, published in Antwerp in 1629. Only one copy of the book survives, published by Cornelis Galle, a Flemish printer and engraver who had already produced the engravings for the Jesuits' Vita Beati Patris Ignatii Loyolae Religionis Societatis Iesu Fundatoris, a biography of their founder Ignatius of Loyola published in Antwerp in 1610. These drawings by van Dyck, the resulting engravings and the painting itself all show a strong influence from the prints illustrating Cascini's 1627 biography.
caption: A 1629 drawing of Saint Rosalia in the British Museum.
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