Reuse and reception in the life of a sixteenth-century chimneypiece

This article examines three stages in the material life of a sixteenth-century Italian chimneypiece in Granada, Spain, which signal historical shifts in attitude toward stylistic origins and categories, particularly with regard to the period known as the Spanish Renaissance. Thought to have been commissioned from Genoa in 1546 for the new royal palace of Charles V, the fireplace was abandoned along with the unfinished building in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In 1630 it was stripped of its white figurative ornament and appropriated as an altar frame within the eclectic programme of the Alhambra's 'Mexuar Chapel', formerly a Muslim council chamber. Three centuries later, in 1929, modern restorer Leopoldo Torres Balbás recovered the ornaments and ordered the reassembly of the chimneypiece in an upper room of the emperor's newly completed palace, where it continues to sit as an unlabelled piece of Cinquecento furniture. This article focuses on the biography of this object, considering each stage of its commission, adaptation and restoration as indexical of historical meaning and the valuation of styles across time. © 2015 The Society for Renaissance Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.