 Altars, to which Calvinists, unlike Lutherans, took strong exception, were typically completely removed, and in some large churches, like Utrecht Cathedral, large tomb monuments put where they stood, partly to make their return more difficult if political conditions changed.After the Eighty Years War was finally over, in the cities and areas that became Protestant, the old Catholic churches were all or nearly all taken over by the new established church of the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Church, with other congregations left to shift for themselves.<ref>Spicer, 116–124, and following pages</ref>

The bare and empty state of those churches left in Catholic hands after the hostilities eventually ended prompted a large programme of restocking with Catholic art, which had much to do with the vigour of Northern Mannerism and later Flemish Baroque painting, and many Gothic churches were given Baroque makeovers.<ref>Vlieghe, 4, 13</ref> In the north, now very largely Protestant, religious art largely disappeared, and Dutch Golden Age painting concentrated on a wide range of secular subjects, such as genre painting, landscape art and still-lifes, with results that might sometimes have surprised the Protestant ministers who initiated the movement.According to one scholar, this "was not only a dramatic change in the function of art, it was the context in which our present concept of art, what the literary critic M. H. Abrams called "art as such", first began to take shape", replacing a "construction model" where art theory concerned itself with how the maker created his work, with a "contemplation model" concerned with the effect of the finished work on a "lone perceiver" or viewer.<ref>Wagner (short quotes from Abrams), 131</ref>





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