Museu Nacional de Belas Artes

When you step off Avenida Rio Branco into this monumental building, you are standing inside one of the boldest gambles of early twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro.

Between 1906 and 1908, the city was tearing down colonial neighborhoods to carve out a Parisian-style boulevard called Avenida Central. Mayor Francisco Pereira Passos wanted modern boulevards, electric lights, and civic institutions that looked thoroughly European. Spanish-born architect Adolfo Morales de los Ríos gave him precisely that: a palace designed for the National School of Fine Arts that refused to commit to just one historic style.

If you inspect the architecture, you will notice different European centuries sharing the same walls. Morales de los Ríos placed French Renaissance symmetry on the grand avenue, wrapped Italian Renaissance details around the sides, and settled into quiet Neoclassicism at the rear. High above the entrance, caryatids hold up the pediment, while heavy German iron gates guard the threshold. It was an ambitious, slightly theatrical composite, built to convince the world that fine art had found a permanent capital in the tropics.