Bob Cassilly played a profound role in reshaping the look and feel of St. Louis. The sculptor turned curator and creator of City Museum, Turtle Park, and many other beloved local installations remains one of St. Louis’ most esteemed residents more than a decade after his tragic death in 2011.
But before Cassilly became a visionary for a new urban landscape, he played just as significant a role in preserving one of the world’s most beloved masterpieces, Michaelangelo’s sculpture Pietà. While the media covered the incident at the time, it’s become a forgotten chapter in Cassilly’s remarkable life.
Named with the Italian word for “pity,” the Pietà depicts Mary cradling the body of Jesus in the aftermath of the crucifixion. Erected by Michaelangelo in 1498 and 1499, it was installed at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City in the 1600s and has spent most of its days there ever since, becoming one of the world’s most venerated works of art.
On May 21, 1972, Cassilly and his new bride were visiting St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City as part of their honeymoon, an old-fashioned grand tour of Europe, he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. As they approached Pieta, Cassilly saw a man with a long beard climb onto the sculpture. The man reportedly screamed about Jesus Christ and started desecrating the statue, smashing at Mary’s face and removing her hand with an implement that proved to be a geologist’s hammer, a fearsome tool with a long chisel head.
The man, Laszlo Toth, was a mentally ill Hungarian-born geologist who recently moved to Rome from Australia. According to reports by the Associated Press, Toth believed himself to be Jesus Christ and said that Mary was not his real mother.
Cassilly was the first person to rush Toth and start to restrain him. He climbed the statue and grabbed at Toth’s beard. Cassilly punched Toth and brought his destruction to an end. “I leaped up and grabbed the guy by the beard,” Cassilly later told People Magazine. “We both fell into the crowd of screaming Italians. It was somewhat of a scene.” The young man from St. Louis’ courage inspired others to take down the hammer-wielding vandal.
Cassilly, Toth, and the others involved in the incident walked away with a few bruises, but the statue had suffered significant damage, both to Mary’s face and her left hand. Preservationists worked for years to restore Pietà to its original glory. The statue now sits in St. Peter’s Basilica behind bulletproof glass.
Toth was not charged with a crime but instead committed to a psychiatric hospital for two years. The Guardian reported that Toth later moved back to eastern Australia and lived in obscurity until his death in 2012.
Cassilly returned to St. Louis and opened a restaurant in Lafayette Park called Park Place, which he sold in 1978. Slowly but surely, he started earning commissions as a sculptor and began putting his own playful, historically-minded touches on the city’s landscape.
While Cassilly’s role in saving Pietà is surprisingly little known, it serves as an interesting and, in some ways, unsurprising footnote to his life’s work, which was seemingly forward looking and backward looking at the same time.
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