mistress of the vatican.pdf - End Time Deception

Mistress of the Vatican
He asked Francesco Borromini for ideas. Borromini suggested representing
the four major rivers of the world—the Nile in Africa, the
Danube in Europe, the Ganges in Asia, and the Plate in South America,
as the obelisk towered above them. Innocent was intrigued by Borromini’s
idea and instructed him to divert water from the nearest
aqueduct—the Acqua Vergine—to the Piazza Navona. The pope made
tin and lead available for the pipes.
Moving the fallen obelisk to the Piazza Navona was an arduous engineering
task. The heavy slabs were dug up and hoisted out of ditches with
ropes and pulleys. Once on flat ground, each slab was harnessed to four
pairs of buffalo and hauled, inch by painful inch, to its new location.
With the pipes in place and the obelisk ready for resurrection, Innocent
held a competition for several artists to make models of the fountain,
but he wasn’t thrilled by the results, not even by the model created
by Borromini, which was stiffly somber. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who
had been on the outs with the pope since 1646 when his bell towers had
been dismantled, had not been invited to compete.
But Prince Ludovisi was a good friend of Bernini’s who felt that the
artist had been given a raw deal. One day the prince asked Bernini to
call on him, and when the sculptor arrived Ludovisi told him his secret
plan. If Bernini would craft a model for the fountain, he would make
sure that the pope saw it. A short time later, on August 15, 1647, when
Innocent visited Olimpia for lunch, he walked by a table on which the
prince had placed Bernini’s model of wood and gesso. The pope was
thunderstruck by its originality and beauty. The rivers were represented
by four enormous river gods; in its breathtaking entirety, the fountain
was a baroque jumble of dramatic surprises.
“This design must be by Bernini!” Innocent cried. Bernini’s son Domenico
wrote that the pope walked around the model for half an hour,
studying it from all angles. “The pope called for Bernini and apologized
for not having him work for him before, and ordered him to
make the fountain according to his design.” 13
When Borromini heard that his ancient rival, whom he thought he
had vanquished once and for all, had been given the enviable commission,
he was foaming-at-the-mouth angry. It had been his idea to represent the
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