The emergence and spread of new images - photography, film, television and audiovisual - have established an important epistemological revolution oriented contemporary man to take on a confident attitude not only towards the image but also to the real. The modern knowledge, that made explode man’s certainties in hundreds of relative truth, has been removed; the perfect double of reality offered by the new media has quietly deleted the doubt to the faithful restitution of reality into images, and, consequently, to the events of the outside world. To counter this credulity, this mental breakdown, so defined by Joseph Conrad, became widespread in contemporary society, we will need to recover the principles and themes of modern thought born in the seventeenth century. A recovery, this, that will serve not only to oppose the illusions and deceit, but also to better understand the nature of the new images.