dynamic opposites, and the basically pictorial and non-graphic treatment of the painting, his taste for light effects, sfumato and "atmosphere", bring him closer to the Baroque and romantic style. The works he copied during his studies were basically by masters of these schools. This dialectic was very old, it was present within the European academies since the 17th century, when the dispute between the followers of Peter Paul Rubens and Nicolas Poussin arose, who defended the supremacy, respectively, of color over drawing, and of drawing over color. This dispute implied the primacy of reason, orthodoxy and purity of spirit, symbolized by drawing, or that of emotion, irrational intuition and sensualism, symbolized by color, which brought important moral associations in the context of the time. The controversy, in fact, was never resolved. For specialists such as Mario Barata and Lilia Schwarcz, Meirelles production fits more correctly into the eclectic romanticism typical of the second half of the 19th century, with its patriotic and idealistic associations and a certain sentimentality, a tendency that predominated in the period of Pedro II's maturity, and which coincided with the heyday of Brazilian academism. But Jorge Coli, speaking at the same time of Meirelles and Pedro Américo, observed that: In any case, the academic system had the classical reference as central in its ideological body and in its teaching methodology, and represented a remarkably successful attempt to formulate a theory in which art was an incarnation of the ideal principles of beauty, truth and good, destined to be a powerful instrument of public education and social reform. It is not by chance that the academic program was systematically supported and decisively conducted by all the States in which it flourished, as was the case in Brazil. Gonzaga Duque and other intellectuals of his time, who advocated an art more focused on realism and bourgeois themes disconnected from an association with the interests of the State, and who were harsh critics of various aspects of Meirelles' production and academic art in general, reflected the great changes that Brazil was going through. Society and culture were accelerating their updating in many other aspects, the entertainment industry was emerging, technology, science and freedom of thought were on the rise, the bourgeoisie became an increasingly important market and abandoned the role of passive recipient of lessons from aesthetic authorities, making their tastes prevail in an environment increasingly dominated by personal