In 1536 the Palazzo Te left Mantua. It reappeared in Bavaria, where Ludwig X erected a copy in Landshut. It left again in 1537, surfacing in Sebastiano Serlio's Tutte le opere d’architettura, and again in 1543 when it re-emerged in Fontainebleau at the court of Francis I. The Palazzo Te kept leaving throughout the sixteenth century as its spaces were taken up and put into play at other Italian and European courts through copies, appropriations, and imitations. Visiting dignitaries and courtiers sent letters and drawings as they moved between Mantua and other court centers, and prints of the palace and its frescoes circulated even more widely. The Palazzo Te is a fixed building located in Mantua, but the relationships created between spaces and people as they moved in and amongst physical locations meant that the palace was also geographically unbounded. The Palazzo Te and the gendered identities performed within it were always in the process of being reimagined, remembered, and rebuilt.

The Renaissance conception of the building as a body has led to the treatment of architecture as closed, bounded by facades that, like the skin of the human body, produce a circumscribed and whole subject. Instead, I aim to treat the Palazzo Te as a monstrous space: it is boundless, fragmented, polysemous, disruptive, terrifying, and fascinating. The palace opens onto and into other spaces through artistic and architectural appropriation, the movement of bodies, and the practices of inhabitants. The spaces of the Palazzo Te therefore impinged upon other buildings creating a vast, gigantic network that spread outward in geography and in time.