Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo (29 April 1843 – 7 October 1905) was a Brazilian novelist, poet, scientist, art theorist, essayist, philosopher, politician and professor, but is best remembered as one of the most important academic painters in Brazil, leaving works of national impact. From an early age he showed an inclination towards the arts, being considered a child prodigy. At a very young age, he participated as a draftsman on an expedition of naturalists through the Brazilian northeast, and received government support to study at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He did his artistic improvement in Paris, studying with famous painters, but he also dedicated himself to science and philosophy. Soon after his return to Brazil, he began to teach at the Academy and began a successful career, gaining prominence with great paintings of a civic and heroic character, inserting himself in the civilizing and modernizing program of the country fostered by emperor Pedro II, of which the Imperial Academy was the regulatory and executive arm in the artistic sphere. His style in painting, in line with the great trends of his time, fused neoclassical, romantic and realistic elements, and his production is one of the first great expressions of Academicism in Brazil in its heyday, leaving works that remain alive in the collective imagination of the nation to this day, such as Batalha de Avaí, Fala do Trono, Independência ou Morte! and Tiradentes Esquartejado, reproduced in school books across the country. In the second half of his career he concentrated on oriental, allegorical and biblical themes, which he personally preferred and whose market was expanding, but this part of his work, popular at the time, quickly went out of fashion, and did not receive much attention from specialists in recent times remaining little known. He spent his career between Brazil and Europe, and in both places his talent was recognized, receiving great favors from critics and the public but also raising passionate controversies and creating tenacious opponents. For the new avant-gardes of his time, Pedro Américo was a painter of undeniably rare gifts, but above all he became one of the main symbols of everything that the academic system allegedly had as conservative, elitist and distant from the Brazilian reality. His great artistic merits make him one of the greatest painters the country has ever produced, and his fame and influence in life, the burning debates