Van Dyck in Sicily, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Seven magazine review Van Dyck would paint at least a couple of other portraits in Sicily, including a darkly understated full-length of the Genoese merchant Desiderio Segno and a much smaller head of Sofonisba Anguissola, a venerable female painter whom he met at the grand age of 92. Soon, however, he was more in demand as a creator of religious pictures. He painted a theatrically gruesome Stoning of St Stephen, in a manner close to the mature style of his master, Rubens; and a broodingly melancholic St John the Baptist in the Wilderness, which, with its strong chiaroscuro and simplified composition, suggests he had also come under the influence of Caravaggio. But above all, Van Dyck painted images of a hitherto somewhat obscure 12th-century saint named Rosalia. Long venerated in Palermo, her remains were said to have been miraculously discovered in a cave on the nearby Monte Pellegrino during the summer of 1624, just as plague broke out. The archbishop of the city had them housed in a grand reliquary and processed through the town in the hope of warding off disease (a ritual still repeated every July in Palermo). As Rosalia's cult spread, the demand for images of her surged. In the space of a few months, Van Dyck painted at least five pictures devoted to the saint, in the process fixing what would become her standard image. He imagined her as a second Mary Magdalene, alone in a wilderness, with long blonde hair and eyes turned upwards to heaven in supplication for the saving of Palermo. The artist played various different variations on the theme. There is a solemnly contemplative version painted predominantly in the colours of earth; a propulsively Baroque version in far brighter colours, in which she is wafted to heaven by clouds of cherubim; and an operatically demonstrative version in which she might almost be singing for Palermo's salvation. Borrowed variously from museums in London, Madrid, New York, Houston and Puerto Rico, they will probably never be seen together again. Collectively, they reveal an unfamiliar side of Van Dyck. On the strength of his later Stuart portraits, he is often regarded as a quintessentially urbane, courtly painter. But these Palermitan altarpieces emanate a sense of spiritual urgency so extreme it borders on hysteria. Van Dyck was by no means immune to the fears and superstitions of his age. Dulwich Picture Gallery, to May 27, www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk