<P> Ten years after the Council of Trent's decree Paolo Veronese was summoned by the Inquisition to explain why his Last Supper, a huge canvas for the refectory of a monastery, contained, in the words of the Inquisition: "buffoons, drunken Germans, dwarfs and other such scurrilities" as well as extravagant costumes and settings, in what is indeed a fantasy version of a Venetian patrician feast . Veronese was told that he must change his indecorous painting within a three - month period - in fact he just changed the title to The Feast in the House of Levi, still an episode from the Gospels, but a less doctrinally central one, and no more was said . No doubt any Protestant authorities would have been equally disapproving . The pre-existing decline in "donor portraits" (those who had paid for an altarpiece or other painting being placed within the painting) was also accelerated; these become rare after the Council . </P> <P> Further waves of "Counter-Reformation art" occurred when areas formerly Protestant were again brought under Catholic rule . The churches were normally empty of images, and such periods could represent a boom time for artists . The best known example is the new Spanish Netherlands (essentially modern Belgium), which had been the centre of Protestantism in the Netherlands but became (initially) exclusively Catholic after the Spanish drove the Protestants to the north, where they established the United Provinces . Rubens was one of a number of Flemish Baroque painters who received many commissions, and produced several of his best known works re-filling the empty churches . Several cities in France in the French wars of religion and in Germany, Bohemia and elsewhere in the Thirty Years War saw similar bursts of restocking . </P> <P> The rather extreme pronouncement by a synod in Antwerp in 1610 that in future the central panels of altarpieces should only show New Testament scenes was certainly ignored in the cases of many paintings by Rubens and other Flemish artists (and in particular the Jesuits continued to commission altarpieces centred on their saints, but nonetheless New Testament subjects probably did increase . Altarpieces became larger and more easy to make out from a distance, and the large painted or gilded carved wooden altarpieces that were the pride of many northern late medieval cities were often replaced with paintings . </P> <P> Some subjects were given increased prominence to reflect Counter-Reformation emphases . The Repentance of Peter, showing the end of the episode of the Denial of Peter, was not often seen before the Counter-Reformation, when it became popular as an assertion of the sacrament of Confession against Protestant attacks . This followed an influential book by the Jesuit Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542--1621). The image typically shows Peter in tears, as a half - length portrait with no other figures, often with hands clasped as at right, and sometimes "the cock" in the background; it was often coupled with a repentant Mary Magdalen, another exemplar from Bellarmine's book . </P>

Some catholic artists working in protestant territories during the reformation are