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The prince stands in the stirrups, sword up, hats answering. The dispatches that provoked it are back in a saddlebag.

Brazil's independence runs backward compared to everyone else's: the empire moved to the colony first. Fleeing Napoleon in 1807, the entire Portuguese court, some 15,000 people with the treasury, the archives and the royal library, crossed the Atlantic and made Rio de Janeiro the capital of a European empire, the only time that has happened. When the king finally sailed home in 1821, he left his heir Pedro as regent, and Lisbon's parliament set about demoting Brazil back into a colony: courts closed, powers revoked, the prince summoned home like a schoolboy. Pedro's first refusal, in January 1822, is remembered by a single verb: fico, I am staying. The break itself arrived by courier on 7 September 1822, on the banks of the Ipiranga, a brook outside São Paulo, where the 23-year-old regent, returning from an inspection trip and suffering, the eyewitnesses insist, from a punishing intestinal complaint, opened dispatches that stripped his regency to nothing, alongside letters from his wife Leopoldina and his minister José Bonifácio telling him the moment had come. He read them by the roadside, drew his sword, and gave the shout the schoolbooks keep: independence or death. By December he was emperor of Brazil, 23 years old, crowned in an opera-house ceremony in a country that would keep his family's throne for 67 years and keep slavery for 66 of them, the empire's other inheritance. The painting of the shout was made two generations later and 4,000 miles away: Pedro Américo, Brazil's academic star, painted it in Florence in 1888 for the museum being built on the very hill at Ipiranga. Critics noted at once that the muddy trail had become a parade ground, the road-worn escort a squadron of dress-uniform dragoons at the charge, and the composition a close cousin of a famous Meissonier; Américo answered with a pamphlet on artistic license and won by hanging. The one concession to the actual road is in the left corner, where a barefoot drover with his ox cart watches the founding of his country from beside the ditch, dressed for the Brazil that existed. The canvas hangs today exactly where it was painted to hang, in the Museu do Ipiranga above the brook, the national image reproduced on every schoolroom wall. The drover usually gets cropped.