one he left in historical painting, and although his portraits and landscapes were also praised in his time, today they are largely forgotten by critics. Among his historical paintings, the most important work is undoubtedly A Primeira Missa no Brasil, for which he became best known and celebrated to this day. In 1861, just completed, the painting was accepted with praise by the Paris Salon jury, an unprecedented achievement for a Brazilian artist. The richness of the painting's details, representing multiple expressions and situations, its evocative, technical and aesthetic qualities, immortalized the official narrative of the Discovery of Brazil as a heroic and peaceful act, celebrated in ecumenism by colonizers and indigenous people. Jorge Coli, reflecting on the critical consensus, wrote that: "Meirelles has reached the rare convergence of forms, intentions and meanings that make a painting powerfully enter a culture. This image of discovery can hardly be erased, or replaced. It is the first mass in Brazil. It is the powers of art making history." His panoramas, in turn, were received with great enthusiasm, but today, with only preparatory sketches remaining, one can only conjecture about their real appearance and quality. Meirelles also made many opponents, who considered him outdated and saw in academic conventions nothing but artificiality and empty rhetoric of meaning for the changing times. If, on the one hand, the Primeira Missa no Brasil got him homages and decorations such as the Order of the Rose, it also gave rise to the first criticisms, precisely because of what would be "excessive imagination" and infidelity to reality. The exhibition of another of his great compositions, Batalha dos Guararapes, alongside the Batalha do Avaí by Pedro Américo, at the Salon of 1879, gave rise to an unprecedented public debate in the Brazilian art scene. It is estimated that around 80 articles have been published on the event, inaugurating a fertile period for the formation of a body of criticism on aesthetics and ideology in Brazil, addressing controversial topics at the time such as nationalism, the role of criticism and the opposition between the avant-gardes and academic tradition. This exhibition also became memorable because it managed to mobilize virtually the entire population of Rio de Janeiro, with 292,286 visits being recorded over a period of 62 days, demonstrating the enormous interest of the general population in the artistic agitation of those days and in nationalist themes. At the time