The story
The great hall of the Museu do Ipiranga in São Paulo is built around one canvas. Pedro Américo's Independence or Death, more than 7 metres wide, shows the prince Dom Pedro by the Ipiranga stream on 7 September 1822, sword raised, declaring Brazil's break with Portugal. The museum stands close to the spot where that scene is said to have taken place, and the building was first conceived as a monument to it.
The Italian architect Tommaso Gaudenzio Bezzi designed the palace in the 1880s on the model of Renaissance palaces, and it opened as a museum on 7 September 1895. Américo had finished his painting in Florence in 1888, and historians have long pointed out its liberties. Accounts of the day suggest the prince rode a mule, the usual mount on that steep road, and the composition has been compared to a Napoleonic battle scene by the French painter Meissonier.
Today the museum belongs to the University of São Paulo. Its director in the 1920s, Afonso Taunay, reshaped it around the history of São Paulo, commissioning paintings and statues of the bandeirantes, the colonial backwoodsmen who pushed into the interior. In 2013 the building closed for structural repairs. It reopened on 7 September 2022, the bicentenary of independence, with new galleries built beneath the esplanade in front, and its restored rooms again show furniture, documents and pictures from Brazil's imperial past.
