What did the renaissance produce?

The Renaissance influenced so much of our world today. The Renaissance changed the world in just about every way one could think of. It had a kind of snowball effect: each new intellectual advance paved the way for further advancements. The Renaissance produced artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello, who played with new techniques such as perspective, light and shadows, realism. People began to study the human anatomy producing a better understanding of how our bodies work. Advances in chemistry led to the rise of gunpowder, while a new model of mathematics stimulated new financial trading systems and made it easier than ever to navigate across the world. Columbus discovered America, Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition to circumnavigate the globe. In 1440, Gutenberg introduced the printing press to the world - meaning that for the first time, books could be mass-produced. By 1500, printing presses in Western Europe had produced more than 20 million volumes. And by 1600, that had risen to 200 million. Radical thinkers such as the Protestant Luther and the humanist Erasmus expounded a new way of looking at the world that owed less to blind subservience to the Catholic Church and more to the possibilities inherent in the human mind.