Marco Sassone
"Study for Saint Francis"
Museo ItaloAmericano
Date unavailable

Born in 1942 in Tuscany, Marco Sassone is a noted Italian-American painter who has exhibited widely in both the United States and Europe in the course of the past thirty years. After a period of architectural studies at the Istituto Galileo Galilei in Florence, Sassone next turned to painting under the tutelage of Silvio Loffredo, himself a student of the great Austrian painter Oskar Kokoshka.

Sassone's distinctive style is deeply rooted in the tradition of the late 19th century Italian painters known as the Macchiaioli, and has since developed in the context of 20th century European and American art. Moving to Southern California in 1967, he soon established a significant reputation for passionate landscape paintings characterized by vibrant color and powerfully energetic brush strokes. In a review published in 1975, Los Angeles Times critic William Wilson described him as "impressively gifted as a colorist and skilled in rendering reflections and color in light."

In 1982, coincident with the relocation of his studio to San Francisco, Sassone plunged with equal passion into the world of the poor and the homeless who lived in his immediate vicinity, producing a remarkable body of drawings and paintings in which he gave moving expression to his personal sense of identification with "exiles" of all kinds.

It is in this context that his "Study for St. Francis" may best be understood. In a true sense, he was the ideal painter to be commissioned to create this particular mural for the North Beach Catholic Church of Saint Francis in San Francisco, for he was able to bring both natural passions into play, as well as his own deeply felt roots. Born but a stone's throw from St. Francis's home town of Assisi, he could work from a sense of empathetic affinity for the saint who was called to abandon his wealth to minister to the poor and the dispossessed, and whose compassion reached also-famously-to the world of animals and birds. Sassone portrays him as at once great and humble: kneeling, yet rising in monumental scale above everything around him-the church, the landscape, the city glimpsed afar. His inner fire seems to generate an apocalyptic firmament around him, the very birds flocking to him as though drawn irresistibly by his passion. To his left (our right) a wolf is seen gazing up at him in acknowledgment of his spiritual authority.

At once vulnerable and powerful, man and saint, Sassone's Saint Francis speaks to us of our place in the universe, caught between earth and heaven, matter and spirit, suffering and ecstasy. It is a grandiose and memorable vision, and one that reminds us of the need for both passion and compassion in our lives.