1 Most of us today take lots of photographs. A long time ago, people did not have cameras. Artists did paintings to show how things looked. These paintings looked real. They were called realistic paintings.
2 An artist who painted this way tried to make things real. It was hard. The artists had to draw carefully. They had to add shadows. They had to add highlights. These tricks helped their work look more real.
3 Artists learned a lot of new things to help them. They learned a lot from the 14th to the 16th century. This was called the Renaissance. The word means "rebirth." Three famous painters were Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. They painted frescoes on the walls of important buildings in Rome.
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