  This paper aims at proving the fundamental role of a relativistic formulation
for quarkonia models.
  We present a completely covariant description of a two-quark system
interacting by the Cornell potential with a Breit term describing the hyperfine
splitting. Using an appropriate procedure to calculate the Breit correction, we
find heavy meson masses in excellent agreement with experimental data.
Moreover, also when applied to light quarks and even taking average values of
the running coupling constant, we prove that covariance properties and
hyperfine splitting are sufficient to explain the light mesons spectrum and to
give a very good agreement with the data.
