From Granada to Berlin sets out to tell the long history of an early-fourteenth-century Alhambra wooden cupola that once covered a room in the Partal tower, but is now exhibited at the Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin. Despite the seeming risk of writing an art-historical account that spans almost seven centuries, Anna McSweeney masterfully navigates different temporalities, geographies, cultures, and archives, while also traversing several disciplinary boundaries. In reconstructing the cupola's histories without privileging one over another, the book also conceives of the Alhambra as a populated space of an architecturally aggregate nature. Its buildings and interior furnishings, each embodying its own complex biography, register marks of the Alhambra's historic ruptures. The cupola, as McSweeney observes, is simultaneously a fragment from/of the Alhambra and an object in its own right in the museum. It is this “lack of fixity” or “in-betweenness” that the book endeavours to convey.

The first five chapters explore the cupola's inextricable relationship with its site and immediate architectural setting. The Partal's marginalization and conversion from royal to military residence upon Granada's conquest (1492); the Alhambra's gradual deterioration after Granada lost to Madrid its royal and military status (end of the sixteenth century); Spain's eighteenth-century royal and intellectual ambivalence toward its Islamic heritage; and the Napoleonic occupation that left the Alhambra depopulated and virtually in ruins – were all events that changed the cupola's patrons and social make-up, informed its varied perceptions, and heralded its eventual dislocation. McSweeney closely studies the cupola's design, construction, iconography, and meaning, while also salvaging the Partal from scholarly oblivion. Overshadowed by the Alhambra palaces complex surrounding the Comares and Lions courtyards, nineteenth-century accounts considered the Partal a sub-structure that once formed part of a courtyard enclosure. Through comparison with similar structures across the Mediterranean, McSweeney convincingly proposes that rather than a royal residence, it may have belonged to a typology of freestanding royal pavilions set in gardens, and convened under its cupola intimate gatherings for entertainment, recreation, and reflection.

Despite renewed interest in the Alhambra from the Spanish crown and Madrid fine arts Academy in the mid-eighteenth century, repair funds went to the palaces complex, not the Partal. Hence, it was sold and taken into private hands in 1828. McSweeney uncovers a profusion of fascinating documents and rich visual evidence created between the 1820s and 1830s by foreign artists, now able to rent the Partal and experience its cupola first-hand. Besides representing their romanticized version of the building through the lens of the picturesque and the ruin aesthetic, these works, exquisitely reproduced in the book, become records of the Partal's architectural alterations, vital for assessing later twentieth-century restoration strategies and biases.

The last three chapters engage the historic erasures pertinent to transforming the Alhambra into a heritage site (depopulation and architectural “cleansing” that restored the site to the time of the Christian conquest and imposed a single, unifying “Islamic” or Alhambresque style); the creation of Spanish institutions charged with administering and classifying national heritage; collecting practices that indulged European museums’ desire to expand their Islamic art collections; and the cupola's mobility outside Spain and final anchoring in Berlin. Notwithstanding Spain's embracing its Islamic heritage, expressed in the 1870 proclamation of the Alhambra as a national monument, the Partal again fell outside the “official” heritage category. Alongside its cupola, it was purchased in 1885 by Arthur von Gwinner, a German banker, industrialist, collector, and politician – a member of a wealthy elite network actively involved in the art world's institutions and market. McSweeney charts the intersection of Gwinner's biography with that of the cupola, its transfer to his Berlin home, and its place in the wider context of nineteenth-century aristocratic taste that viewed exotic Alhambresque interiors as an exemplary backdrop against which to stage sophistication and knowledge. Such an acquisition gained Gwinner a reputation as an expert on oriental art, and additional influence when acceding to board membership in the Pergamon Museum.

The cupola was purchased in 1978 by the Museum of Islamic Art in Dahlem, West Berlin, after its reacquisition was disapproved by the Spanish government, despite petitions by the Patronato de la Alhambra. Art historian Richard Ettinghausen's appraisal reported to the museum the cupola's supremacy among ceilings “anywhere” – “and even in the Alhambra itself there is only one which can match it in quality” (p. 135). Here the book could have been expanded to contextualize the cupola within the Alhambra's counterparts as well as the history of wood construction in Iberia (including under Christian patronage) and the Islamic world. How do we understand the cupola relative to seventeenth-century theoretical treatises on the carpintería de lo blanco such as that of Diego López de Arenas? What knowledge, practical or theoretical, if any, was available to those who produced the cupola's 1964 replica in the Partal? This barely constitutes a critique, as these topics, understandably, must exceed the limits of a book chapter.

Documents proving the cupola's legal purchase have been presented against Granada's recent repatriation demands. McSweeney raises questions of ethically reconsidering Spain's nineteenth-century political and economic instability and inability to protect its heritage against a fierce foreign art market. As ethical claims fall short of resolving legal claims, she argues that museums have a role in rethinking curatorial strategies for displaced, contentious objects. Indeed, recent efforts by museums to reorganize the display of their Islamic collections make their case to free objects from unitary modes of seeing and thinking, and instead provide distinct viewing and interpretive frames that cut across cultural spheres, societies, and geographies. In anticipation of the Berlin Museum für Islamische Kunst's plans to display the cupola, expected in 2026, From Granada to Berlin could not be timelier. How will the museum creatively translate for its visitors (and perhaps virtually for those in Granada) the visual oeuvre and the multiplicity of narratives and recollected stories offered by McSweeney's stimulating study?