Italian printmaker, goldsmith, medalist, and gem engraver Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio, a pupil of Marcantonio Raimondi, achieves distinction as an engraver.

His copperplates (seventy of which are extant) are chiefly reproductions of the Italian masters, such as Raphael, Titian, and Michelangelo.

Active in Parma and in Rome, he moves in 1539 to Kraków, where he enters the service of the Polish court.

King Sigismund of Poland had in 1518 married Bona Sforza d'Aragona, a young, strong-minded Italian princess.

Bona's sway over the king and the magnates, her efforts to strengthen the monarch's political position, financial situation, and especially the measures she took to advance her personal and dynastic interests, including the forced royal election of the minor Sigismund Augustus in 1529 and his premature coronation in 1530, have increased the discontent among szlachta activists.

The opposition middle szlachta movement comes up with a constructive reform program during the Kraków sejm of 1538/1539.

Among the movement's demands are termination of the kings' practice of alienation of royal domain, giving or selling land estates to great lords at the monarch' discretion, and a ban on concurrent holding of multiple state offices by the same person, both legislated initially in 1504.

Sigismund I's unwillingness to move toward the implementation of the reformers' goals negatively affects the country's financial and defensive capabilities.