Realism:
The switch from religion-centric art to human-centric art was visible through paintings and sculptures. Paintings became more realistic and less focused on God and deities. As can be seen in the table below, realism differed greatly from traditional Middle Aged paintings, not only in paints used but also in style.
A key difference is the paints that contributed to the style of the paintings as well. Egg tempera as a paint dried much more quickly than oil paints, which gave artists less time to edit their artwork, which probably was why it didn't look realistic and features didn't look as different and unique as they could have. Something that wasn't mentioned in the table was that faces in the Middle Ages were all very similarly constructed compared to Renaissance art, and the only way that people could tell them apart was because of their unrealistic size difference.
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Here I'd like to go into more detail about the use of vanishing points and perspective to make Renaissance art realistic. In two very well known paintings, the School of Athens and The Last Supper, perspective was used to draw attention to certain people and make it seem realistic. In the School of Athens, Raphael used the vanishing point to draw attention to three men standing at the very top of the painting, and in a similar fashion, The Last Supper was painted in a way that all the points of the walls and ceiling converged right in the middle of Jesus' head.