Faydherbe started his career at a crucial moment in the history of Flemish sculpture. In the first place, there was the religious context. The churches in Flanders had been emptied of their decorations by the iconoclasts in the 16th century and the Roman Catholic Contrareformation demanded that artists created paintings and sculptures in church contexts that would speak to the illiterate rather than to the well-informed. The Contrareformation stressed certain points of religious doctrine, as a result of which certain church furniture, such as the confessional gained an increased importance. These developments caused a sharp increase in the demand for religious sculpture. Secondly, the sculptors Jerôme Duquesnoy the Younger and Artus Quellinus the Elder who had worked in Rome in the workshop of François Duquesnoy had returned to work in Flanders in the 1640s and realized many projects that introduced the classicizing Baroque style developed by François Duquesnoy. They revolutionized the role of the sculptor from that of an ornamentalist to that of an independent creator of art works that replaced the individual architectural elements by an artwork that united sculpture and painting into an harmonic ensemble. Rubens, the leading Baroque painter in Flanders, also subscribed to the idea of the unity of the arts of sculpture and painting and this is the reason of his association with sculptors such as Johannes van Mildert, Georg Petel and Faydherbe.