The renaissance didn't appear just as differently styled buildings, it had a huge impact on the peoples' everyday-life. Before they had had to go to church and pay their respects to the priests and abbots but renaissance was a time that everyone was allowed to think about themselves.
It was prosperity that made the rise of renaissance possible, and of course that affected the life of different estates as well. At first the era affected only the higher class, but slowly the lower classes got the chance to enjoy the new lifestyle.
The most important thing affecting life was probably the change in the position of the church. New knowledge was also acquired as people started thinking by themselves and stopped blindly believing in the doctrines of the church. New philosophers and ways of thinking appeared, for example Humanism and Scholasticism. Humanism is defined as 'a renewed confidence in the ability of human beings to determine for themselves truth and falsehood'.
Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci, Galleria dell'...
Nicolaus Copernicus
Nicolaus Copernicus Monument in Kraków, by Profes...This clearly states that it is not God who decides, it is the person itself.
As mentioned before, renaissance of course appeared in peoples' lives in ways that are not as obvious, for example art and architecture. Buildings and paintings began to have a lot more detail to them, and they were very similar to the ones in the Ancient Greece and the Roman times. The way a building or a statue looks became more important than the actual structure of the piece of art.246
When people started thinking beyond the things the church had taught them, new inventions were made. In the early Renaissance people who questioned the "common knowledge" taught by the church were sentenced to prison as traitors to God, but some, like Copernicus, were persistent and finally he introduced his theory of a sun-centred universe. Inventions like the compass and the caravel led to the expansion of Europe.
Of course, the Renaissance was a time of fun and enjoying life. Lots of luxury goods were produced and transported, such as fruit and meat. These had to be transported from a distance, and the merchants were becoming more and more important.