Sebald Beham, a German artist expelled, with his brother Barthel, from Nuremberg in 1525 for religious and political freethinking, returns briefly to the city in 1531 to complete the “Planets” engraving series.

The accusations against the Beham brothers were connected with their Lutheran beliefs, the city authorities then being Catholic, although they adopted Lutheranism as the city's official religion only two months later.

The three artists were soon allowed to return to Nuremberg, but in 1528 Beham had hurriedly left the city once more, following the threat of legal action over his treatise on the proportions of the horse, which was regarded as having been plagiarized from an unpublished manuscript by Albrecht Dürer, who had recently died.

He had then spent time working in various German cities; his woodcuts were published at Ingolstadt between 1527 and 1530, and in the latter year he was in Munich, where he recorded the triumphal entry of Emperor Charles V in a woodcut entitled The Military Display, June 10, 1530.