During the fifteenth century oil painting was increasingly used as a fine arts medium, and in the sixteenth century it became the principal painting method in northern Europe and Italy, becoming preferred by many artists over egg tempera, fresco, and distemper painting. The gradual adoption of the oil medium came soon after the systems of perspective and light-and-shade drawing had been absorbed into the pictorial styles of the period, replacing the more stylized almost signlike compositions of the earlier artists.