Mark Sassani stands in his studio. In his right hand, he holds a supposedly miraculous photograph of one of his paintings.
Writing and photos by Wes Cipolla
Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on September 5, 2021.
I have fond memories of Route 61. During my childhood summers, it was a yellow brick road to the paradise that was Knoebels Amusement Park. The lush mountain scenery and small towns my family and I passed through, along with the increasingly elaborate billboards advertising the park (a 3-D Ferris wheel!), made the journey as exciting as the destination. Last winter, I had the idea to do a column about interesting places people can visit on the way to Knoebels. During my research, I found that Knoebels is surrounded by an unusually large number of religious sites. Route 61 is a sort of pilgrimage route, probably the only one on Earth that ends with roller coasters and baked potatoes. You can call it El Camino de Kozmo. In this column, I seek to reveal the histories of these holy places and what they mean to the people who worship there. From great churches to one man’s passion, these sites tell diverse stories of faith, love and humanity’s relationship with the divine in Northeast Pennsylvania.
MOUNT CARMEL - Before he paints a religious icon, Mark Sassani prays. The fruits of the artist’s work, the thousands of cross-hatching brush strokes which portray the Virgin Mary’s robes in agonizing detail, can be seen in his studio in Mount Carmel.
“You pray a little bit more, you just try to get more spiritually in tune when you have to,” said Sassani, a mostly self-taught artist and devout Catholic. “The eastern icons, that’s a different story compared to the western icons.”
In western Christian art, heavenly light shines on Jesus, Mary and the Saints just like it would on anyone else. In eastern Christian art, the light comes from the people themselves, often in the form of nimbuses (haloes) around their heads. Rather than realistic proportions and perspective, iconographers focus on elongated and stylized figures. Sassani’s studio is filled with well-worn, heavily marked books about the making of icons.
“The focus of an iconographer is more on the spiritual than the visual,” he explains on his website. In the early church, icons were written by priests and monks who had very little artistic training. That is part of the reason for the primitive style of the early icons.”
In 1999, Pope John Paul II encouraged western artists to make more icons, and Sassani took heed.
“Feelings can be deceptive,” he said, “but yeah, I think it gives you a feeling that there is a presence of God there. You try to pray before you do an icon. My wife and I say a rosary every day, unless our schedules don’t allow it.”
His first icon, portraying Our Lady of Perpetual Help, was made in response to the burning of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Mount Carmel. Much of the church’s artwork was saved and restored, some by him.
“It’s a house of god burned down,” he said, “it was destroyed. It was a sad situation.”
His second icon was an image of Christ and the Sacred Heart.
“I think I was the first one to have an icon of the Sacred Heart,” he said, “a western devotion in an eastern art form.”
Town doctor Jeffrey Greco gave a print of the icon to a deeply religious woman from Shamokin. The woman sent Sassani a Polaroid she took of the painting, which she claimed had a bleeding radiant light emerging from the icon.
“Doctor Greco said it’s a sign,” Sassani said.
Sassani lives next door to St. Joseph’s Fine Art Studio with his wife and family. His daughter Lori followed in her dad’s footsteps, opening an art school in Brazil. Sassani is an accomplished artist who has painted dogs, judges and murals for high school proms. He likes painting farmers, people who “work for mankind, do God’s work, provide food for the masses.” He is fascinated by the aspirations of farming, the hope that the crops will thrive. Every plant is a prayer. He feels the same way about his landscapes, filled with light, color and living things.
“I think beauty helps people, seeing beauty,” he said. “I like the beauty of God’s creation. I can’t do what God did, but I try to show the beauty of nature.”
At 70, Sassani has an all-American grandfatherly look - fitting because he is, in fact, a grandfather - complete with a fuzzy mustache, a flannel shirt tucked into his jeans, an inquisitive look in his face and a tendency to digress when he tells stories from his life.
“Do you want something, Grandpa?” His granddaughter Clara interrupts him. She wants to know if he wants anything from Pepe’s Italian Ice across the street.
“I don’t want anything,” he says, arms akimbo.
He’s currently putting the finishing touches on a statue of Mary, a wall pedestal given to him by a young priest in Steelton and a painting of Saint Gemma Galgani, bearing the stigmata on her wrists that supposedly appeared miraculously on its own.
He even does prints of Jesus and Mary inspired by Andy Warhol.
Not only does Sassani create religious art, but he and his assistants have restored thousands of statues, paintings and stained glass windows across the anthracite region and beyond. Some of his restored works are now in a Ukrainian seminary in Washington, D.C.
“If you are making or restoring religious art, you need to do research and pray,” he said. “It’s something to grasp. You have to pray about it.”
On his computer he shows me the statues he has restored, so many faded saints and shattered Virgins repainted in Technicolor. Sassani’s cat Serena sleeps on a paint-stained work table.
Sassani looks at one of the statues he restored, and what it looked like when it was broken.
Along with all of his art, he has a soccer jersey signed by Pelé framed on the studio wall. Sassani is an Extraordinary Minister of Communion at Mount Carmel Parish, and has taken communion to the sick since 1995.
“A lot of them are grace-filled people,” he said. “They accept their position and state they are in, and they seek the Lord. You give ‘em communion and they start cryin’.”
Taking communion to the sick inspired him to focus more on spiritual matters in his art.
“It was a humbling experience to see old people, especially those that are on their deathbed, and even younger men and women who are in accidents,” he said. “It was just a humble experience to see people who lived their whole lives stuck in situations like that. God gave me a lot of abilities and talents in life, it’s hard to explain, really.”
At first he was unsure, and felt unworthy of being an Eucharistic minister.
“No one is really worthy of that,” his priest told him, “but God himself.”
Like the enigmatic icons he painted, with their complex symbolism and otherworldly form, Sassani’s life is a cross-hatching of legends and apocrypha, saintly mysteries and divine afflictions.
“It’s hard to put into words.” He said. “It’s all part of the whole deal. My faith, my art, you try to make it all in one.”
He was born in the same house he lives in now. His mother was an Italian dry-cleaner and his father was a Lithuanian shoe repairman. His grandfather’s brother Carlo was dying of pneumonia in Italy. The family prayed a novena to Saint Joseph. If he saved Uncle Charlie’s life, they would hold a feast on Saint Joseph’s Day every year for the rest of his life. The family feasted for sixty years. Sassani was raised Catholic, but his family did not attend mass often. His grandparents and godparents, however, were fervent.
When Sassani was a little boy, he hit his head on the playground basketball pole while running away from a bully. He burst a blood vessel in his right eye, leaving a spot in his vision for the rest of his life. When he looked directly at a book, the words became blurry. He couldn’t read like the other kids and fell years behind them academically. Instead of paying attention to his lessons, he started to draw. When he was in fourth grade, his school had a Halloween window-painting contest, but it was only open to eighth-graders and older. Sassani approached some of the older kids and he made a deal: “Let me help with your classroom window, and we’ll split the winnings 50-50.” Sassani ended up painting the whole thing, and that class won the contest.
In 1974, Sassani graduated from Mansfield University with a degree in art education. He was an All-American wrestler in college and still follows the sport. After graduating, he set up his studio on the corner of Fourth and South Chestnut Streets, where it stands today. In 1980, he married his wife Donna, and regained his faith.
“My wife keeps me on the stick,” he said.
In 1994, Sassani remodeled his studio - but what to name it? Sue Berger of Berger’s Catholic Shop in Elysburg gave him a hollow plastic figurine of Saint Joseph and told him to put it in his studio.
That was enough for Sassani to name his livelihood after the Saint who purportedly saved Uncle Charlie.
The figurine of Saint Joseph that inspired Sassani.
“He devoted his entire life to the Christ, to the Blessed Mother and to God,” he said about Saint Joseph. “It was a different time, you know. You try to do your best.”
The most significant icon in Sassani’s studio is one of Jesus Christ, based on the work of the Russian master Andre Rublev. This icon was in the possession of another deeply religious woman in Atlas, whose house burned to the ground with the icon inside.
“That and the Bible were the only things that survived,” he said. “You can still smell the fire if you take it off the wall.”
Sassani holds his icon that survived the fire.
He gave me the icon. The smoke from the fire still streaked its background. I smelled nothing.
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