Antokol - a picturesque suburb of Vilnius, nestled in the hills, once interspersed with rivers and streams, was a fishermen's settlement where the Lithuanian elite liked to build their homes from the 16th century onwards. As late as the end of the 15th century, a modest wooden church of St Peter - fisher of human hearts - was built there. In 1638, the Lateran Canons Regular from Krakow, who were associated with the reforms of the Council of Trent, took over the care of the church.

The foundation of the brick temple and monastery for the monks was decided by Michał Kazimierz Pac, Hetman of Lithuania and Voivode of Vilnius, who had a brick manor house (later Sapieha Palace) less than 800 metres to the north. The foundation was not only an expression of his piety, but also a votive offering for his salvation during the soldier tumult and for liberating Vilnius from Moscow occupation, as it was he who, against orders, led the soldiers to a victorious clash. As Michał Kazimierz Pac was unmarried, he made the church a monument to his life and a mausoleum. It is to him that the inscription on the façade refers: "REGINA PACIS / FUNDA NOS IN PACE" (Queen of Peace, grant us peace), which associates the Latin pax (pacis) with the name of the Lithuanian magnate who brought peace (prosperity) to his subordinate lands. The inscription can thus be translated: Queen Paca (my patroness) grant me peace (happiness, prosperity, well-being).

The temple was designed by Jan Zaor, a builder from Kazimierz, Krakow, after whose death in 1672 the work was taken over by Giovanni Battista Frediani from Lucca, whose speciality was engineering. He had already consulted on Zaor's project and it was to him that we ultimately owe the erection of the imposing dome, but also the chiaroscuro - columnar and therefore Roman façade.

The two-towered façade does not announce the spatial layout of the interior, which is single-nave, with a transept and a presbytery ending in a semicircle, framed by two sacristies. Adjoining the nave are two pairs of chapels (St Monica, St Augustine, St Cerbonius and St Ursula), which are connected to each other by short, dark corridors. Between them and the transept are rooms, invisible from the nave, from which it was once possible to get outside the church (the portals are still in the wall, being the frames for the epitaphs). Chapels have also been organised in the ground floor of the towers.

The architecturally modest interior has a rich stucco decoration, which was worked on from 1677, together with Italian helpers, by outstanding artists Giovanni Maria Galli and Giovanni Pietro Perti, both from the canton of Ticino (Switzerland). The former specialised in ornament making and returned to his homeland after finishing his work in late 1684 and early 1685. The second was an expert in figures. He married the daughter of the painter Michelangelo Palloni, who was brought from Florence to decorate the church in Pažaislis (Kaunas), and then settled in Vilnius, where he decorated the Sapieha Palace, the Trinitarian Church of Lord Jesus, and the Chapel of St Casimir at the Cathedral. A little later are the altars in the arms of the transept (1700-1702), which were made by Andrea Sancti Capone and Joannes Pensa for the confraternities attached to the church: the Five Wounds of Jesus and Our Lady of Grace.

The painting decoration of the shrine of the Canons Regular of the Lateran was to be done by Martino Altomonte. Unfortunately, the painter only managed to paint two rooms of the sacristy, and was forced to abandon his work in the face of the founder's death and lack of funds. However, he remained in the Republic, working for John III Sobieski, and later for the imperial court in Vienna. However, it is not known who the author of the scenes recounting the lives of St Peter and St Paul on the vaulting of the nave, which were probably painted after 1685.

Stucco masterwork

Both of the above-mentioned stucco artists, highly educated and extremely talented, referred in their work to the most outstanding realisations of the then seventeenth-century art world. At the same time, they were characterised by a great deal of ingenuity, as well as a skilful voyeurism of the reality around them, which they then processed in their artistic language. In their search for classical beauty, they created one of the most unique stucco decorations in the whole of Europe in Antokol.

So we see flowers enchanted in stucco ornament, including rose bushes growing out of vases, or birds playing between olive branches. Elephant heads also appear, reminding us of Africa, where the Bishop of Hippo, St Augustine, legislator of the Lateran Canons Regular, came from. As the temple was founded by the victorious Hippolytus, there could be no shortage of depictions of panoplies and holy soldiers - the first Christian martyrs, but also St George, St Stephen, St Martin and many others. They war with creatures representing evil powers - enemies of body and soul. The saintly women in the chapels of St. Monica and St. Ursula are dressed in the fashion of the second half of the 17th century. In the church dedicated to St Peter and St Paul, one could not fail to find statues of the Twelve Apostles, images of the popes, but also personifications of the Eight Beatitudes, which tell the story of who gets the kingdom of heaven.