LONDON.- Dulwich Picture Gallery presents Van Dyck in Sicily: Painting and the Plague (15 February – 27 May 2012), the first ever exhibition to focus on the prolific year and a half that Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) spent in Sicily between 1624 and 1625. The exhibition reunites for the first time the 16 works, all portraits and paintings of religious subjects, that are documented, or believed to have been painted during that year in Palermo. The most significant group of paintings produced by Van Dyck in Palermo are the images of the city’s patron saint, Rosalia. Not only did Van Dyck create Rosalia’s iconography as we know it today, but he also witnessed the events of that summer that fixed the saint’s role for the city. The saint is still to this day highly venerated by the citizens of Palermo. The exhibition brings together every painting of Rosalia by Van Dyck, not only from America, but also from London, Spain and Puerto Rico, allowing them to be seen in the same room for the first time.