With discoveries in sciences came breakthroughs in art, one being the use of perspective. Perspective added a new dimension to paintings and became a foundation in art for the next five hundred years. Paintings with perspective recede into one point (called a vanishing point), and the images within get smaller and blurrier. This is one technique used to make painting more realistic; another was the actual medium used. The Renaissance enabled artists to stray from painting on church walls and experiment with oil based paints on stretched canvases. With oil based paints there were a broader range of rich colours that could be gradated much smoother. As for light and shadows a new technique called spumato was emerging. Spumato shading made it appear as if the lighter parts of the painting were coming forth from the shadows, thus its name, meaning light and shadows in Italian, is fitting. This technique emphasized and added a rounded illusion to paintings. The final breakthrough that embodies the essence of The Renaissance is the actual composition of the paintings. Painters wanted to emphasize what they were painting, and one way to do so is to configure the content in a symmetrical fashion thus bringing the climax of the piece to the center. When this is done we see a pyramid, or triangle, that leads our focus from base to peak (the peak usually being the focal point). Combined the above elements define what we know as Renaissance art, and we can fully attribute the "rebirth" to the bold artists who, with the help of science, pioneered new artistic techniques in the Renaissance. .
Part of the Renaissance coincided with Lorenzo de" Medici's reign, which was a golden age for men of genius; one who flourished was Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli was the son of Mariano Filipepi, a citizen of Florence, who brought him up with care, teaching him everything, as to keep him well rounded. Although Sandro quickly mastered anything that he liked, he was always restless and could not settle down at school.