The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul (; ) is a Roman Catholic church located in the Antakalnis neighbourhood of Vilnius, Lithuania. It is the centerpiece of a former monastery complex of the Canons Regular of the Lateran. Its interior has masterful compositions of some 2,000 stucco figures by Giovanni Pietro Perti and ornamentation by Giovanni Maria Galli and is unique in Europe. The church is considered a masterpiece of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Baroque. It was funded by Michał Kazimierz Pac, commemorating a victory over the Muscovites and their expulsion from Vilnius after six years of occupation.
History
The foundation of the first church in this location is unknown, although, while digging the foundations for the present-day church, workers found a sculpture of an unknown knight. That inspired a legend that the first wooden church was founded by Petras Goštautas, a legendary ancestor of the Goštautai family, well before the official conversion of Lithuania to Christianity by Jogaila in 1387. More likely, the church was founded by Wojciech Tabor, Bishop of Vilnius (1492–1507). The wooden church burned down in 1594 but was rebuilt in 1609–16. In 1625, Bishop Eustachy Wołłowicz invited Canons Regular of the Lateran. Their new monastery was officially opened in November 1638. Bishop of Samogitia Jerzy Tyszkiewicz gifted a painting of Blessed Virgin Mary of Mercy () to the church and the monastery. The painting was brought by Tyszkiewicz from Faenza, Italy around 1641–47, and depicts Our Lady of Graces, patron of Faenza. Even though it was not canonically crowned, it was covered in silver riza and attracted votive offerings.
During the wars with Russia in 1655–61, the monastery was burned down and the church was destroyed. The construction of the new church was commissioned by the Great Lithuanian Hetman and Voivode of Vilnius Michał Kazimierz Pac. It is said that Pac was inspired to rebuild the church after a 1662 incident when he hid in its ruins and thus narrowly escaped death from mutinous soldiers who later killed Wincenty Korwin Gosiewski, Field Hetman of Lithuania, and Kazimierz Żeromski. Before this project, Pac, having made only a couple relatively minor donations to Bernardines in Vilnius and Jesuits in Druskininkai, was not known as a patron of the church or the arts. Pac, who never married, envisioned that the church would become a mausoleum for the Pac family. The construction works started on 29 June 1668 (the day of the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul) under the supervision of Jan Zaor from Kraków and finished in 1676 by Giovanni Battista Frediani. Pac brought Italian masters Giovanni Pietro Perti and Giovanni Maria Galli for interior decoration. The works were interrupted by the founder's death in 1682. According to his last wishes, Pac was buried beneath the doorstep of the main entrance with the Latin inscription Hic Jacet Pecator (here lies a sinner) on his tombstone. At the end of the 18th century, lightning hit the church, knocked down a sculpture which fell and fractured the tombstone; the incident inspired many rumors about Pac and his sins. The tombstone is now displayed on the right wall of the main entrance.