mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
high cheekbones. Sensual full lips poked out beneath his silky black
mustache. His jaw was square, and an adorable cleft marked his chin.
He had quite a reputation as a womanizer and apparently sculpted
the likeness of his rowdy mistress as Divine Love on the pope’s tomb.
When Bernini turned forty, Urban announced that it was time for the
loyal son of the church to marry and settle down. The pope had, in fact,
already found him a wife, the most beautiful girl in Rome, Caterina
Tezio, whom Bernini dutifully married and with whom he had eleven
children.
Bernini’s extraordinary success at an early age, flamboyant personality,
and dashing good looks irritated his fellow artists, who were less
successful, less flamboyant, and less good-looking. But the most irritated
of all was the sullen Francesco Borromini, born in 1599, the absolute
antithesis of Bernini in appearance, demeanor, and personality.
Borromini was not an attractive man, with his small, hard eyes, hooked
nose, and thin lips. He had a disheveled appearance, and those who saw
him must have restrained themselves from whipping out a comb and
trying to tame his hair. There were no woman stories wafting about
Borromini like cheap perfume, nor were there any boy stories, either.
He lived a solitary existence, pouring his passions into his work and his
vengeance.
Borromini felt that he would be Rome’s top architect if only that
windbag Gian Lorenzo Bernini had not come into the picture. In terms
of solid engineering skill and architectural originality, Borromini had
the advantage over his rival. While keeping colors and costs to a minimum,
he created designs that were unique, unexpected, employing inverted
geometrical forms in ways that had never been done before.
For all his startling genius as a sculptor, Bernini’s architecture employed
conventional forms overlaid with lavish colorful materials. Engineering
was his weakest point. He had gone through a baptism of
fire—literally—when casting the bronze baldachino in Saint Peter’s.
Toward the end he realized the structure could not bear the weight of
the risen Christ he had designed for the top. The four colossal statues
Bernini had placed on the piers surrounding the baldachino had been
designed to react to the figure of Jesus in the center. But they ended up
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