mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Eleanor Herman
But Bernini’s flamboyance got the better of his common sense. In
February 1646, at the behest of Olimpia, he wrote and produced a Carnival
play at her palazzo for a crowd of cardinals and nobility. Bernini
made the sets and costumes and joined the young noblemen of Rome in
acting. Unfortunately, the play made fun of the pope and the cardinal
nephew. The ambassador of Modena, Francesco Mantovani, explained,
“There was depicted in the play a youth who had good will but who
never did anything and an old man who never could make up his
mind.” 19
Though the script has, tragically, been lost, we can still hear Olimpia’s
loud guffaws as she poked fun at her inept son and her indecisive
brother-in-law. She must have seen no harm in it because other Bernini
plays given at her palazzo poked fun at Olimpia herself, making her out
to be a greedy, power-hungry vixen; she chuckled hardest at these.
When he heard about the play, the old man who could never make
up his mind couldn’t make up his mind about it. Draped in his brittle
dignity, Innocent had never been one to laugh at himself. He asked Cardinal
Panciroli his opinion about Bernini’s play. The cardinal reassured
him that it was just another silly piece of Carnival revelry that would
soon be forgotten.
But the young man who never did anything was furious. Camillo
complained bitterly to the pope that the play had his mother’s “tacit approval
and reinforced the caricature of the cardinal nephew circulating
at court.” He told his uncle the play was “foul.” 20 Everyone in Rome was
talking about it and making fun of him.
Camillo vowed to wreak his revenge. Though Olimpia seemed untouchable
at the moment, Bernini was in a very delicate situation due to
the bell towers. He was also fragile politically; the spoiled darling of the
reviled Barberini family, he stood on a precipice, ready to tumble after
them into the fissures of disgrace.
While the enemies of the Barberinis circled their prey, and the jealous
architects of Rome pounced, it was the cardinal nephew who bit into the
jugular. According to Bernini’s contemporary biographer, Filippo Baldinucci,
when Innocent retired to an estate outside Rome for a few days,
“enemies of Bernini and the Barberini family, especially a certain person
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