The aim is to study the book work A poesia do Corpo, written by Fernando de Azevedo in 1915, while applying for the position of Gymnastics and Physical Education teacher at Mineiro High School, where he was already a substitute teacher of Latin. In order to do so, I will oppose it to Edgard de Souza's sculptural group, installed in Inhotim - Instituto de Arte Contemporânea and Jardim Botânico, placed in Minas Gerais, Brasil – intending to delimit a critical contemporaneous parameter founded on the art work, which in its dialogue with the sculptural western tradition, raises issues that may contribute to the reading of Azevedo's text. Fernando de Azevedo took into account, in this first book, the aporias between head and body to reason that education could not 'orbit', and 'stagnate' into the attention to the 'brain', and to the 'sentiments', postulating the overcoming to the dichotomy between 'physical education' and 'moral education'. Before Edgard de Souza's sculpture, who used his own proper measures to create sculptures in bronze of his headless body in movement, one may raise questions about Azevedo's text, such as what are the relations of orientation, controllership and consciousness established between the head, which keeps the brain, and the care of the body in reference to the emergence, to the volition and, to the formation of sensations, feelings, senses, meanings, subjectivity, reason, identity? How can one conceive the repercussion of the relation between the head and the body in the institution of collectivities inscribed in social entities? The myriad of possible answers to those questions point out that 'the body is a battlefield', which take place on the most diverse scopes, social, cultural, political and historical, beyond and below the own body. My proposition is to extend this viewing to the threshold of the modern era to examine the permanences of civility conceptions and practices that inform, on one hand, the emergence and formation of subjectivity, rationality, modern western identities, and, on the other hand, the emergence and formation of modern sensations, feelings, senses. One may envisage the possibility of precising the points of conceptual and practice inflections in the old precepts about the formative care of bodies and societies which, this way, define the very own possibility of 'modern' such as it is. We assume it is relevant to consider the artistic production dimension to define the absorption of factors that kept overlapping, overlying, imbricating, creating multiple interrelations and interdependencies until giving form to what is called 'modern'. Therefore, the proposal is to examine the development of the institute of decorum, and of convenevolezza, along with the modern State structuration and the court culture, amongst the  political and social aristocratical hegemony, delimiting their embodiments, but also their inflections for an ascendant bourgeois culture in the urban capitalist organization, in which the moral values of civility and urbanity inform, in different arrangements, the emancipation or colonization of bodies and societies.