mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
the plays and music, creating the sets and costumes, and even acting and
singing in them. Tragedies were popular—suicidal lovers, sacrificial virgins,
and breast-beating heroes dying on the battlefield. But comedies
were even more popular, and Olimpia particularly enjoyed putting on
humorous plays poking fun at contemporary figures.
Theater made use of “machines,” contraptions of floats, pulleys, and
levers that could lift actors and even horses into the air by means of almost
invisible wires. Some machines held up to a hundred singing angels.
Others were decorated as dragons, with flapping wings, swishing
tails, and mouths that opened with a shriek to emit a fiery blast. Allegorical
figures were extremely popular at the time; actors and actresses
representing Divine Justice, Holy Religion, and Saintly Sacrifice would
declaim onstage and then fly straight up to heaven.
Rome’s foremost artists contributed to these events. In the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, an artist did not keep strictly to one discipline
but was expected to be the master of many. Painters sculpted,
sculptors painted, and both were hired as architects for palaces and
churches. They were called upon by the powerful to design carriages,
furniture, clothing, and even spun-sugar desserts in the shape of statues
and buildings. And the rich commissioned them to design machines,
extensive sets, and costumes for their Carnival performances.
The darkly handsome Gian Lorenzo Bernini, though known primarily
for his genius in sculpting marble, undertook his many theatrical
commissions with gusto. He was a showman, a ringmaster who
loved to surprise, startle, and frighten with his elaborate stage sets and
special effects. Bernini was particularly admired for creating a gradual
sunrise and sunset, and for darkening the stage at the approach of a
sudden storm, followed by thunder, lightning, hail, and rain. This was
an impressive feat, considering he had only torches, oil lamps, and mirrors
to work with.
But his most impressive effect was his frightfully realistic simulation
of the flooding Tiber for Carnival 1638. The river, which had been represented
onstage in the form of wide tanks with actors canoeing on
them, was suddenly diverted into the audience as the stage sets collapsed.
Thinking this was an accident, the alarmed spectators stood up
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