Manuel Araújo Porto Alegre (1808-1879) had fundamental performance in the cultural institutions of the Second Reign, having been painting, critical of art, journalist and poet, among other activities. As director of the Academia Imperial of Belas Artes, the painter promoted the largest reform than it happened in the institution during the empire. The reforms made by Porto Alegre intended to adapt the institution to the technical progresses of middles of the century XIX, and to do of Rio de Janeiro a city tuned in with the "civilization". Are with this objectify that the painter does of the technique one of the central themes of its administration. In this article, tends as object the intervention of Araújo Porto Alegre in Aiba, we intended to approach wchich the contribution of those measured for the constitution of a new social space for the artist of the Empire.