mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
their drawings, three-dimensional models, and watercolor sketches of
paintings suggested for the ceilings. The palace would not be finished
until July 1648, and in the meantime Olimpia would have to live once
more with hammering, scaffolding, and the ever-present sneeze-inducing
film of plaster dust.
The final façade was five stories high and eightcen windows across,
with four doorways and a balcony over each. A painting of her finished
palazzo in 1651 shows it painted pale gray with white woodwork. Olimpia’s
carriage entrance remained the same, though the high double
doors were now in the center of the palazzo instead of on the far right
side. To the left of the courtyard was the same covered triumphal staircase
of the cardinal’s palace. But on the right of the courtyard she had
the old de Rossi house demolished and built four stories on top of magnificent
arches through which horses and carriages could travel to a
second courtyard, where the stables were kept.
Her private apartments—some seven rooms across the front of the
palazzo facing the Piazza Navona—were, in seventeenth-century terms,
in restrained good taste. The carved doorways were of red marble,
splashed with white. The floors were parquet. The sixteen-foot coffered
gilded ceilings depicted mythological scenes. Beneath them for about a
yard, matching frescoes adorned the walls.
The baroque era was a time of decline politically and economically.
The peach was a bit overripe, still beautiful and fragrant, but mold was
beginning to form. After the perfection of the Renaissance, there was
no place for art to evolve other than into wild excess. Painting comprised
the heroic, the theatrical, and the colossal. It attempted not to
re-create reality but to idealize it. Amidst sea monsters, dragons, saints,
and angels, human bodies twisted and writhed, muscular, fleshy contrasts
of light and shadow. Waves crashed. Ships floundered. Among
the larger-than-life figures, mouths hung open in shock and eyes blazed
with fury. Arms were raised to bestow a heavenly blessing or a fatal
blow. And above it all, plump laughing cherubs tossed rose petals.
An extravagant manifestation of the glories of militant Catholicism,
Roman baroque art was a counterweight to the decline of papal power.
In fact, the word baroque was first used derisively by those classicists
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