The Paul VI Audience Hall doesn't look like a serpent.

Recently a Christian friend posted this:

This is a manipulate photo going around on social media that makes the Paul VI Audience Hall appear to be a serpent and claims it was deliberately designed by Rome to appear this way.

Here is another social media post that makes this claim about the The Paul VI Audience Hall

If you get a copy of this type of post on your news feed...stop and think before you hit "Share". Ask this question "Is this true?" 

To answer this question, look at the  Paul VI Audience Hall yourself and not the manipulated image. We harm our witness to Roman Catholics if we spread lies against them, rather than the truth that is in the Bible. 

Here is a video that has no distortion.

The Paul VI Audience Hall sits just behind the Palace of the Holy Office and is one of the Vatican’s most unusual venues geographically: part of the building lies inside Vatican City, while most of it is in Rome but treated as an extraterritorial area of the Holy See. It was built on land donated by the Knights of Columbus, and the roof has hosted a major photovoltaic installation since 2008. Behind the papal chair, Pericle Fazzini’s monumental sculpture The Resurrection—commissioned in the Paul VI era and inaugurated Sept. 28, 1977—anchors the entire space.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1417830843355098

The hall doesn't look like a serpent.

Theo Fessenden

Former Writer: Science, IT and Engineering. at ATT Bell Labs

Pictures taken with wide-angle lenses and digitally altered pictures of the hall have been manipulated to create the illusion of a serpent.

The querent-references illusions made thanks to picture editing and architectural biometric effects upon our brains. It's a form of pareidolia. The snake illusion works only from a particular angle via photography using wide-angle lenses and with the images cropped so only the desired architectural elements appear, and then (often) additionally digitally manipulated ("shopped").

The serpent image isn't there at all. No visitors to the hall see it.

The stage to the right supposedly is the mouth. The window in front, the left eye. Note the parallel ceiling beams that run from front to back. They do not converge. They do not curve. Not very snake-like, is it? But the hall is huge. It's not possible to capture all its features in one wide shot, because being a room, its walls won't allow a camera shot from far enough away to fit everything in. This is why photographers trying to get a picture of as much as possible often use wide-angle lenses.

Here's the so-called snake architecture.

The stage to the right supposedly is the mouth. The window in front, the left eye. Note the parallel ceiling beams that run from front to back. They do not converge. They do not curve. Not very snake-like, is it? But the hall is huge. It's not possible to capture all its features in one wide shot, because being a room, its walls won't allow a camera shot from far enough away to fit everything in. This is why photographers trying to get a picture of as much as possible often use wide-angle lenses.

Note that the oval windows are on opposite parallel walls. They face each other.

Don't see a snake?

Try this view taken with a wider wide-angle lens. Notice how the parallel ceiling beams appear closer to one another on the far side of the hall (opposite the raised alcove where the pope stands).

Still not a snake, but hey, the wedge-shaped supports for the great alcove are interesting. Fangs are wedges, aren't they? No? Well if you look the right way with the right shadowing, then center the shot on the far wall...

Then let's mess with the image by compressing the center and stretching the lateral edges to the point where some parallel features run nearly 90 degrees off of each other. The oval windows that actually face each other on opposite walls now seem obliquely adjacent to the alcove wall.

Ohhh Yes! The blocky wedges look like conical fangs this way. The windows look like eyes. We're getting there!

Now let's just keep on "shopping:" manipulating colors, shapes, highlights; add distortions and such, until we get the most sinister look possible.

Whoo hooo! jackpot! EVIL!

After a while it gets just silly.

Pareidolia — It's natural

Regarding architectural biometric causing pareidolia.

We see illusions in structures for the same reason Madeira Beach's Church By The Sea became popular after a photographer took a picture of it at a particular angle. Now it is known as the Angry Birds Church.

and the Great Mosque of Cordoba looks like an unhappy gollum. 

[Photo: Smithsonian Institute]

Thanks to this trait, we often see faces and other biological parts in things with repeating visual elements, especially those having some, but not all bilaterally symmetrical features.

Really?

Yes, really.