Humanism emerged and flourished in Europe in the first half of the fifteenth century. Human beings had extricated themselves from the confinement of medieval theological doctrines, and started to pay more attention to the mortal life again. Meanwhile, arts also presented new faces featuring the impact of various humanistic ideals of the period. The Renaissance Italian painters, who had followed the contemporary fashion, wished to promote and to restore the status of the classical arts; thus, they applied scientific methods to the process of making art, with realistic effects. They used the revolutionary method of "vanishing point" to deal with the depth of space, the knowledge of anatomy to depict figures, and optics to present three-dimensional objects. The contemporary Netherlandish painters, on the other hand, absorbed the quintessence of Gothic arts as well as dug into skilled realistic techniques to reach their goal. They also created a "virtual reality" through their own experiences in daily life. Symbolism was also often used to reveal the profundity under the surface of an exquisite and faithful representation of real life. There are unique characteristics to aspects of realistic expression in both the Northern and the Southern schools. They were equal to each other in their achievements in early fifteenth-century western arts.