Charles V returned to Mantua in November of 1532. As before, Federico II welcomed the Emperor with a triumphal procession and arranged a day of courtly entertainment at the Palazzo Te. The palace Charles visited in 1532 was not the same building he had seen two years earlier. Almost immediately after the Emperor's departure in 1530, Federico and Giulio Romano undertook extensive additions to the palace, nearly doubling the footprint of the building and executing a decorative program based on themes of imperial triumph and princely virtue depicted in an even more classicizing style. The 1532 visit of Charles V allows us to examine the ways in which the palace intersects with discourses of space and time through a spiraling web of visual and historical citations. Instead of proposing a unified relationship between space and time, the Palazzo Te creates multiple temporal trajectories. It is a space in continuous production, and therefore a space that urges inhabitants to construct and enact a gender identity that is similarly open, performative, and temporally fractured.Performative practices at the Palazzo Te occurred at specific points in time, but were in dynamic conversation with spaces that hovered between past, present and future.

In addition to representing differing temporal trajectories, the images and spaces of the latter phase of the palace were indebted to and intertwined with the ephemeral triumphal processions staged in Mantua during the early 1530s.