ABSTRACT
What connects the Lighthouse (Φάρος) of Alexandria, erected in Ptolemaic Egypt in the third century; the minaret (ṣawmaʿa) of the Almohad mosque in Seville, Spain, completed in 1198; the fifteenth-century glazed or “Porcelain” Pagoda (琉璃塔) of the Bao'en Temple in Nanjing, East China; the tower of the Town Hall (turris curiae) in Brussels, begun in 1449 in what is now Belgium; and the so-called Templo Mayor (Huēyi Teōcalli) of Tenochtitlan, newly (re)built in the early sixteenth century, its partial ruins still visible in the center of Mexico City? Not chronology, material, type, function, patron or design. According to the terms of traditional art history, these buildings are disconnected, static witnesses to the mobile objects, people and ideas that traveled between them. 1
