Maximilian Habsburg, the eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, becomes King of Bohemia in 1562.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who had painted in his youth for the Milan Cathedral in his native city, had in his middle thirties entered the service of the Habsburgs in Vienna and Prague in 1562, and become court painter to Maximilian.

He paints a Four Seasons series in 1563 in the grotesque style for which he is gaining fame.

Many of his works are paintings of bizarre heads formed by combinations of fruits, flowers, animals, or fish.

The Utraquists in Bohemia and Moravia formulate a common doctrinal statement in 1575, accepted by Lutherans and Calvinists and known as the Bohemian Confession (Confessio Bohemia).

Bartholomaeus Spranger had assisted in completing an interrupted fresco project during a ten-year period spent in Rome and Parma.

While working in Paris around 1565, the Antwerp native had been influenced by the work of Francesco Primaticcio and Niccolò dell' Abbate.

Returning to Rome in 1567, he had become an assistant to Taddeo Zuccari, and had later worked for the emperor Maximilian II in Vienna, where he had made a successful career.

Maximilian's son, Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, is to prove an even better patron than his father would have been, and Spranger will never leave his service.

The court had soon transferred to Prague, safer from the regular Turkish invasions.

He had in 1581 been appointed court painter in Prague by Rudolf, and will remain in this city hereafter.

Rudolf is to become an obsessive collector of old and new art, his artists mixing with the astronomers, clockmakers, botanists, and "wizards, alchemists and kabbalists" who Rudolf also gathers around him.

Spranger, noted for his paintings of nudes executed in the late Mannerist style, employs mannered poses, slender, elongated bodies, and a gleaming, brittle texture in his efforts to develop a Northern artistic canon of the human figure.

The figures smile invitingly, and the influence of Parmigianino and Correggio is evident in their voluptuous contours.

Bartholomeus Spranger, on completing his training with Cornelis van Dalem, Jan Mandijn, and Frans Mostaert, had traveled to Paris and Italy in 1565, when he was about nineteen.

The Flemish Mannerist has worked on wall paintings in various churches.

At Rome, he had become, like El Greco, a protégé of Giulio Clovio.

Pope Pius V had appointed him court painter in 1570.

He had been summoned to Vienna by Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, who died soon after his arrival in 1576, but his successor Rudolf II had ben even more keen to employ him, and in 1581 he had been appointed court painter, the court having by then moved its seat to Prague, where he has remained.

Aegidius Sadeler, who lived in his house in Prague for some time, and Hendrik Goltzius have made engravings of his paintings, spreading Spranger's fame around Europe.

Spranger's paintings for Rudolf mostly depict mythological nudes in various complex poses, with some connection to the Emperor's esoteric Late-Renaissance philosophical ideas.

His paintings are the most characteristic of the final phase of Northern Mannerism; by far the best collection is in Vienna.

His drawings have great energy, in a very free technique.

The emperor brings Tycho back in 1599 to Prague, where he receives financial support from several nobles in addition to the emperor, including Oldrich Desiderius Pruskowsky von Pruskow, to whom he has dedicated his famous Astronomiæ instauratæ mechanica, published in 1598.

In return for their support, Tycho's duties include preparing astrological charts and predictions for his patrons on events such as births, weather forecasting, and astrological interpretations of significant astronomical events, such as the supernova of 1572 (sometimes called Tycho's supernova) and the Great Comet of 1577.

The astronomer Christen Sørensen Longomontanus, engaged by Tycho in 1589 as his assistant in his great astronomical observatory of Uraniborg, had rendered invaluable service for eight years.

Having left the island of Hven with his master, he had obtained his discharge at Copenhagen on June 1, 1597, in order to study at some German universities.

He had rejoined Tycho at Prague in January 1600, bringing the rest of Tycho's astronomical instruments with him.

Having completed the Tychonic lunar theory, he turns homeward again in August.

Michael asks again for assistance from emperor Rudolf during a visit in Prague between February 23 and March 5, 1601, which is granted when the emperor hears that General Giorgio Basta has lost control of Transylvania to the Hungarian nobility led by Sigismund Báthory, who has accepted Ottoman protection.

Kepler, several months after departing Graz, has returned, now with the rest of his household, to Prague.

Through most of 1601, he is supported directly by Tycho, who has assigned him to analyzing planetary observations and writing a tract against Tycho's (by then deceased) rival, Ursus.

Tycho had in September secured him a commission as a collaborator on the new project he had proposed to the emperor: the Rudolphine Tables that should replace the Prutenic Tables of Erasmus Reinhold.

Two days after Tycho's unexpected death on October 24, 1601, Kepler is appointed his successor as imperial mathematician with the responsibility to complete his unfinished work.

The next eleven years as imperial mathematician are to be be the most productive of his life.