the Italian painters of the Risorgimento, such as Luigi Bechi. Some critics also find in him Baroque influences from Borgognone and Bernini. Historical paintings "History painting" did not just mean the representation of historical events, but it was the recreation of facts especially significant to a community or nation. It developed a symbolic visual rhetoric and had a moralizing didactic function. It was the most prestigious genre in the academic system, being the one that demanded the most from the artist in terms of creativity, general cultural knowledge and technical skill, it was also the one that could most easily convey an ethical message and the one that could most perfectly illustrate the discourse of the elites, consecrating its values, addressing itself above all to the general public. To achieve its goals, history painting could work with religious themes, properly historical, or absorb mythical figures from the classical past to allegorically lend greater brightness to current events, or to evoke exemplary virtues. History painting is defined by its subject and purpose, not its style. The genre has an immemorial origin, but it was consolidated in the Baroque period, when European absolutism was developing. In this system power is centralized, and all means are used to guarantee the sovereign's total independence and supremacy and assert his glory. From the Baroque onwards, the historical genre entered its golden phase, when the potential of its visual rhetoric was perceived and explored in depth by elites and governments, and, indifferent to the change in styles over the successive centuries, continued to serve the same purposes, always more linked to the civil sphere of society, although it could often incorporate religious elements in a period when Religion and the State lived in close proximity and the doctrine of the divine right of kings was articulated. The iconography produced, exalting the State and its King or representatives, its deeds and military conquests, often showing them blessed by God or by his angels and saints, or surrounded by classical divinities or personifications of virtues, justified, through an art that should amaze, seduce and above all convince and indoctrinate both subjects and foreigners, the maintenance of a system that was capable of such impressive feats in politics as in the arts, which acted in mutual favor. When neoclassicism arrived, the model was simply revisited once more. The genre did not take root in Baroque Brazil because there was