sponsorship and by the work of scholars such as Manuel de Araújo Porto-Alegre. Pedro Américo flourished during the height of Academicism in Brazil. However, despite significant advances in the art system, patronage conditions at the time were unpredictable and the lack of official funding was a chronic problem. As for the private market, it was just beginning to take shape. Academicism systematized a repertoire of visual formulas possessing specific meanings, prescribing rules for their use, as if dictionarizing the history of visuality and organizing it in a peculiar grammar and semantics. More than that, it established a method of teaching art based on hierarchies of values largely derived from the philosophical and educational tradition of Classical Antiquity, with all its list of idealistic moral and civic virtues and all its rhetoric, manifested in art through beauty, harmony and a public utility. Functioning in close dependence on the States and elites, and having an idealistic philosophical basis, the European Academies naturally tended to be conservative, a characteristic that the Brazilian version shared with their European counterparts on whose imitation it was founded, but they were also agents of important artistic advances and on many occasions they were even avant-garde. Style and technique Américo possessed a sophisticated technique, paid great attention to detail and was quick to work. He was always an academic, but a versatile and eclectic one in the most influential and most contradictory phase of international academicism, which defined itself as a complex mixture of classical, romantic and realist references. Américo's work expressed idealistic aspirations typical of classicism, reflected in his "didactic" historical paintings and moralizing allegories, in his sense of hierarchical composition, and even in his humanist writings; his detailed characterization of figures and objects sometimes approaches realism, but his stylistic expression is mostly romantic, which was not really a contradiction, since romanticism was by itself an eclectic and idealistic current and very much indebted to the classics. But Brazilian Romanticism in painting, where Pedro Américo is included, was that of the third romantic generation, when the movement had already lost its original, passionate and revolutionary character, transforming itself into a softer and more conformist, more aesthetic and sentimental current, which quickly became bourgeois and in many ways genuinely "popular". Among the artists who were possibly an influence on Américo's most important works are Horace Vernet, Antoine-Jean Gros, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Géricault and François Gérard, as well as