Over the course of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, the unequal controversial and partial transformation of religious images (from ones invested with complex liturgical, pedagogic and functions, into decontextualized and universalized works of art, admired solely for their formal qualities and not for the message that they carried originally), only occurred after a series of partially independent and slow historical processes: humanist and protestant criticism of the worship of images, the emergence of modern collections and a market for works of art, the disappearance of the collective forms of religious patronage, crisis of the Christian emphasis. It involves, therefore, a number of extremely diverse protagonists, theologians, artists, patrons, cicerone, who, despite sharing common interests, disagreed on the issue of what the images surrounding them really were.