Jan van Eyck was a transformative figure in European painting, as his approach to painting depended on realism and a naturalistic viewpoint. His Ghent Altarpiece, also called The Lamb of God, was a departure from Medieval standards that typically valued idealization and symbolism in religious imagery. Van Eyck, who lived from 1390 to 1441, had an outsized influence on the artistic transformations that occurred during the Renaissance.

Michelangelo (1475-1564) is often considered the prototypical "Renaissance man," along with Leonardo da Vinci, thanks to his key involvement in painting, sculpture, and design. Michelangelo was one of the earliest painters to use realistic imagery, forced perspective, and an enhanced use of color. His work was key in the development of Renaissance themes like a return to classical motifs, a sense of grandeur, and the use of scientific knowledge in the arts.

The Vitruvian Man was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, a contemporary rival of Michelangelo. Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which included the famous Creation of Adam image. The Last Judgment is also in the Sistine Chapel, though it was painted almost 30 years after the ceiling. The Crucifixion of St. Peter was also one of Michelangelo's later works. Both Michelangelo and da Vinci were commissioned to design paintings for the city of Florence, thus Michelangelo drew the plan for the Battle of Cascina, though the final painting was never completed.

Diego Velazquez was an idiosyncratic painter who became the offical court painter for the Spanish king Philip IV. Velazquez's unique composition style, love of odd subjects, and expressive portrait style found its culmination in Las Meninas, a 1656 painting that shows the daughters of the King with their attendants and the painter in a large room with people coming and going. The painting was so remarkable that Pablo Picasso made a cubist version of it in the twentieth century.

After the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution, many people in Britain sought a way to combat religious divisions and conflicts. John Locke, an early enlightenment figure, set out a theory of religious toleration in his Letters Concerning Toleration, which were published without his knowledge by the letters' recipient.  Locke actually only advocated toleration for any Protestant believers, as he argued both atheists and Catholics were enemies of the English state.

The French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650) is well known for being a leading figure in "rationalism," the philosophy that holds that reason is the chief source of knowledge. Descartes' most famous phrase is almost a perfect summation of this viewpoint. "Cogito, ergo sum," a Latin phrase meaning "I think, therefore I am," asserts in one phrase that existence is proved by a person thinking.

Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan was published in the aftermath of the chaos of the English Civil War. Hobbes began with an extremely negative view of human life and the human condition. His full phrasing of the human condition was in the following quotation: "In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." (XIII.9)

In his Discourse on Method and his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes undertakes a radical reevaluation of everything that he currently believes. He questions everything in order to find out what he actually knows is true. Particularly in the Meditations, he develops a detailed thought experiment in which a potential "evil genius" or evil spirit deceives him—even to the point of making him doubt his senses as well as his very ideas about mathematical facts. Thus, he notices, in the midst of this confusion, that one thing remains—even when he doubts and is potentially deceived, he must at least exist. In order to be fooled, you must actually be. This realization becomes a moment of liberation for him, and he then proceeds to prove that the world does in fact exist, though not before first proving the existence of God.

David Hume is most famously associated with skepticism. Often, people recall the stormy picture that he paints at the end of the first book of his Treatise of Human Nature in which he reflects on the skeptical conclusions at which he seems to arise in the first book's discussions. It is arguable that this is a simplistic reading of Hume. Still, this is what most people know about him from his philosophical writings (especially the Treatise as well as his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding). Thus, he is known for doubting the reality of things like personal identity and even the relation of our mind to the external world. 

Lucretius's great poem was a kind of popularization and systematization of the Epicurean cosmology. He presents a kind of worldview that believes that everything physical is merely made up of atoms of different shapes. Indeed, there is nothing more than this matter. He uses this overall cosmology (as had various Epicureans) to present arguments regarding morality.

It should be noted that while this outlook is also called "materialism" (in that it reduces everything to matter), it should not be associated with self-indulgence. Lucretius and other Epicureans were actually quite strict people, whose goal was the reduction of pain, not the maximization of pleasure. Indeed, one of his ways of reducing pain was by critiquing the so-called gods of the Greeks and Romans using the overall atomistic outlook.