Artesonado or Spanish ceiling is a term for "a type of intricately joined wooden ceiling in which supplementary laths are interlaced into the rafters supporting the roof to form decorative geometric patterns",[1] found in Spanish architecture. It is an example of Mudéjar style.
Artesonado decoration is usually in regular recesses between the rafter beams and the woodwork is gilded or painted. It originated in the Islamic regions of North Africa[citation needed] and Al-Andalus, as can be seen at the Nasrid palace of the Alhambra, and was introduced into the Iberian Christian kingdoms by Muslim craftsmen [citation needed] during the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula. The name comes from the Spanish word artesa, a shallow basin used in bread making.
Beginning in the 13th century, artesonado ceilings continued to be built through the Spanish Renaissance in the 15th and 16th centuries, with a change of the motifs to a classical Greco-Roman style.[1]
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