a controversial ruler to become an icon, the savior of the homeland, the perfect hero and leader, riding a dashing horse, in full dress uniform and commanding a battalion of equally shiny and intrepid dragoons, who respond to the memorable cry in a univocal, vigorous and harmonious way and represent, together with some peasants who watch the scene, the entire Brazilian people, strong, loyal and united. Américo himself stated that: The contradiction of the controversies about being modern or being faithful to the facts was that while many criticized the falsity of the compositions, in several aspects the painter was very faithful to reality. Pedro Américo, like many other painters of his generation, effectively used photographs as a model to describe the topography of the scenarios, the individual details and characterizations, the cavalry and war equipment. In fact, there was a lot of popular consumption and easily accessible iconography about soldiers and militias. Américo even carried out field research and requested interviews, documents and photographic portraits of some of the still-living characters who participated in historical events, seeking a realistic pictorial transposition to these elements. Probably his scientific training also inclined him to this – although he himself rejected the label of a realist painter – and by adopting this anti-academic, anti-idealist procedure, he received a partial approval by the critics of the academy, who considered him a renovator of the historical genre in comparison to the more "old-fashioned" and "conservative" Vcitor Meirelles. He thus placed himself in a sense at the forefront, although in other aspects the premodernists still saw him as a formal scholar. However, Américo proposed reforms in the academic system to accompany the evolution of the times and incorporate the aesthetic diversity that existed in his time in many texts, and even rebelled against the excess of idealism of the more traditional academics and the School of Fine Arts in Paris. In 1943, with the celebrations of the centenary of Américo's birth, Gilberto Freyre and José Lins do Rego, important intellectuals in Brazil, spoke about him. Despite the moment being a tribute, Freyre still repeated modernist criticisms in his questioning of the favors that Américo enjoyed from the government and his supposed lack of "Brazilianness", and although Rego admired his figure "without limits" and paid him countless compliments, he confessed that his art did not please him much, calling him a "great man who had failed"