In its criticism of Michelangelo’s late production and reverence for Raphael and the Antique, Ludovico Dolce’s Aretino (1557) provided a few founding principles that would be fully developed by the classicist theory of art in the following centuries. Frequently discussed in academic circles during the seventeenth century, Dolce’s polemical dialogue was eventually reprinted in French and Italian in 1735 with a preface by Nicolas Vleughels, director of the French Academy in Rome, who drastically reformed the institution, laying the ground for the spread of the neo-classical aesthetic in the second half of the century. This essay will discuss the seminal role of Dolce’s Aretino in the formulation of a classicist theory of art and its impact on eighteenth-century art theory and academic practices.