From an anachronistic point of view, that is, from a position assumed in the present, the thesis proposes a reading of the work of the Swiss-Brazilian engraver Oswaldo Goeldi (1895-1961). This approach is taken, however, in order to first locate what would be a current, relevant theme to justify a study of Goeldi s work and, then, to retrace the same theme to the historical context of its creation, in Brazil, between the 1930s and 1950s. With the theme located both in the artistic appropriation and in the most recent critical reception of Goeldi s work, namely, the failure of the modern project acknowledged as a progression in historical time understood as modernity, the aim is to understand, thus, the consolidation of the historical consciousness of this failure. The study of Goeldi s work occurs, therefore, in the face of distinct contexts so that the theme can be seen as a semantics that would be internal to it and that, once identified, runs through the understanding of the history of Brazil itself. In the first, in the 1930s, the semantics of Goeldi s work itself is discovered with its formal configuration related to his paternal descent from the Swiss naturalist Emil August Goldi (1859-1917). Goldi still promotes speculations about the clash between history and nature in Brazil, just as the Bavarian naturalist Carl Friedrich Phillipp von Martius (1794-1868). Martius, in a biology practiced with the use of images and texts, considered that modernity in Brazil was doomed to failure due to the insidious return of nature that prevented the achievement of history, thus elaborating the semantics transmitted to Goeldi s work. In the second, again in the 1930s, the critical reception of Goeldi s work is related to the discussions between the poets and writers Mário de Andrade (1893-1945) and Ronald de Carvalho (1893-1935). Andrade and Carvalho, throughout the decade, discussed what direction the history of Brazil should follow, which determined the very concepts of modern and modernity that they advanced, respectively, as future decay or decayed glory. In the third, in the 1950s, the critical reception of Goeldi s work is related to the discussions of critics Mário Pedrosa (1900-1981), Flávio de Aquino (1919-1987) and the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar (1930-2016). Pedrosa, Aquino and Gullar were involved in an avant-garde project that would assert the failure of modernity in Brazil, which led them to use Goeldi s work in order to propose, based on it, a Brazilian art factually on par with the historical time. The reading of Goeldi s work, therefore, is carried out indirectly so that a contemporary appreciation of it, with the subsidies of its own time, is made possible.