mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
building was leaning dangerously off-kilter—one wall was six feet out
of plumb and slowly pulling the perpendicular walls with it. Given the
shifting sand beneath the basilica, it was a testament to the skill of Constantine’s
engineers that the structure had lasted as long as it did.
Late-fifteenth-century popes pondered what to do with the tottering
basilica, hesitating to destroy something so sacred. But the irascible warrior
pope Julius II (reigned 1503–1513) had no such scruples. The ancient
basilica was torn down, its ancient papal tombs relocated and some of
the art incorporated into the new church. Throughout the sixteenth
century the new basilica was raised by fits and starts. Italy’s greatest architects—Bramante,
Raphael, Sangallo, and Michelangelo—argued
over the design, particularly over the trailblazing dome they wished to
build as a beacon to all Christendom.
Shoddy construction required the tearing down of years of work.
Some popes, facing war, plague, famine, the Sack of Rome, or a bankrupt
treasury, ignored the project entirely. There are several contemporary
etchings of the partially built basilica with large trees growing out
of the piers. But late-sixteenth-century popes raced to finish construction,
and the new basilica was dedicated in 1615.
Saint Peter’s is not the orderly work of one architectural genius who
labored to create a harmonious design. It is a collage of centuries of conflicting
personalities and historical upheavals, organized haphazardly
in an immense space. In Olimpia’s time the basilica was not much different
from the Saint Peter’s of today, only lacking certain later embellishments.
Then as now, the visitor is immediately overwhelmed by the
sheer size of the structure. The eye tries to find a focal point but cannot,
distracted by the multicolored marbles, gilding, bronzes, statues, tombs,
reliefs, lamps, pilasters, columns, and ornate vaulted ceilings. In 1638 a
visiting John Milton found Saint Peter’s so dizzying that years later,
when he wrote Paradise Lost, he located Pandemonium there.
The chief purpose of Saint Peter’s Basilica was public relations, perhaps
best summed up in the 1455 deathbed speech of Pope Nicholas V.
“To create solid and stable convictions in the minds of the uncultured
masses,” he said, “there must be something which appeals to the eye; a
popular faith, sustained only on doctrines, will never be anything but
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