Disfrutar
in the Alhambra

The walls paintings of the chambers of emperor Charles V in the Alhambra: a Visual Hypothesis. An Interdisciplinary Artistic Research on ‘The Fruits room’

Organized by Patronato de la Alhambra y el Generalife and Universidad de Granada
Curator Asunción Jódar Miñarro

Palace of Charles V
Monumental Complex of the Alhambra and Generalife.
October, 28, 2020 – January, 8, 2021
Every days ,10:00 – 18:00 hours.

Free admision

The artists Julio Aquiles and Alejander Mayner painted the walls of the private
rooms of the emperor Carlos V in the Alhambra, which today are known as ‘Th e Fruits’
room. They had been trained in the workshops organized by Rafael Sanzio to paint the Vatican
Lodges in the style of grotesques. This artistic research has elaborated a visual hypothesis
about how these mural paintings might have been. Taking into account the few remains
that are currently preserved in the ‘The Fruits’ room, as well as the paintings of these artists
in the ‘’Queen’s Dressing Room’ in the Alhambra, and the mural paintings of other contemporary
artists in Genoa and Rome, it has been possible to reconstruct the image that the room should have presented. The exhibition presents the four vertical faces of a rectangular prism with the full surface of the four walls of the room at life size: two and a half meters high, three meters wide and nine and a half meters deep. On the outside, the current state of the walls has been photographically reproduced with a print on semi-transparent paper, and on the inside, on another paper separated
by barely two centimeters from the previous one, the splendor of the original paintings has been recreated using digital drawing also printed on semi-transparent paper on which extensive freehand retouching has been applied with colored pencils, watercolor and tempera.The slight transparency of the two surfaces allows us to appreciate the concordances between the pictorial remains that are preserved and the visual hypothesis that reconstructs the original image. Th e Emperor Charles V never saw these rooms fi nished, because after his stay in the Alhambra in the second half of 1526, he never returned to Granada.