Word: bernini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Peter's, where only the Pope may say Mass, the body of Pius XII lay in state for three days. Then, after final absolution, it was placed in a triple coffin (oak, lead and cypress) and interred in the most sacred spot in Christendom-below the Bernini altar near St. Peter's supposed grave, whose discovery the Pope himself announced in 1950. Buried with the Pope was a red bag containing a sample of every Vatican coin minted during his reign, a parchment copy of the eulogy read at the final funeral Mass and the pieces...
Bones & Devotion. Whatever it contained, the Aedicula was revered throughout the 1,200-year life of Constantine's church, and became the heart of the present cathedral, underneath the twisting columns and great bronze canopy of Bernini. By the time Vatican archaeologists, burrowing from below, entered the subsurface grave, the shrine had been altered almost beyond recognition: the two upper niches had been combined to form the present Niche of the Pallia, two small chapels, the Covered and Open Confessio, had been added, and the whole shrine was encased by the present high altar...
...chosen to solve the problem was Gian Lorenzo Bernini, foremost sculptor of his day, who in 1655 began erecting his immense colonnades-inspired, so it was said, by the vision of a form that would appear as a mighty archangel, with outspread, welcoming arms coming out of the body of the church. To round out his grand plan, Bernini placed 140 statues of saints, each 12 ft. in height, around the rim. With its two fountains, each 45 ft. high, and its center fixed by the massive, 320-ton obelisk that Emperor Caligula had brought from Heliopolis. the finished square...
SIENA'S PIAZZO DEL CAMPO, like Rome's Forum, was originally a marketplace set between Siena's three fortified hills. Still the center of the most perfectly preserved medieval city in Italy, the piazza lacks the dramatic impact of Bernini's baroque creation, but it has the charm and mellowness of a slow-growing, organic whole, surrounded with buildings of brick weathered sienna brown and warm pastel shades. The square is large enough to hold the town's whole population in its sloping, shell-shaped form, unified with simple, geometric lines radiating out from...
...cramped, run-down town of Bath, site of an ancient Roman spa, and rebuilt it into a showpiece of Georgian architecture and a prime example of unified English town planning. The younger Wood's supreme gambit was to take one elliptical segment of the oval form that Bernini used for St. Peter's Square, and throw it boldly along the city's outskirts, with an open prospect of unspoiled countryside. Binding together the 30 individual houses was a curtain wall modeled on a Palladian façade with its Ionic columns; behind it, Wood allowed...