Cosmographia (Sebastian Münster) in the context of Urs Graf

Sebastian Münster (20 January 1488 – 26 May 1552) was a German cartographer and cosmographer. He also was a Christian Hebraist scholar who taught as a professor at the University of Basel. His well-known work, the highly accurate world map, Cosmographia, sold well and went through 24 editions. Its influence was widely spread by a production of woodcuts created of it by a variety of artists.

Shooting an apple off one's child's head, also known as the apple-shot (from German Apfelschuss), is a feat of marksmanship with a bow that occurs as a motif in a number of legends in Germanic folklore (and has also been connected with non-European folklore). In the Stith Thompson Motif Index it is F661.3, described as "Skillful marksman shoots apple from man's head" or "apple shot from man's head", though it always occurs in the form of the marksman being ordered to shoot an apple (or occasionally another smaller object) off his own son's head. It is best known as William Tell's feat.

Heinrich Petri (Latin: Henricus Petri; 1508–1579), frequently misdeclined as "Henricus Petrus", and his son Sebastian Henric Petri (1546–1627) were influential early printers in Basel (Basilea). In addition to their own names, their printshop also used the Latin name Officina Henricpetrina.

Among their best known works, both of 1566, the second edition of De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Nicolaus Copernicus, first published in 1543 in Nuremberg by Johannes Petreius, and of Narratio Prima by Georg Joachim Rheticus, published in 1540 in Danzig (Gdańsk) by Franz Rhode.

Hans Rudolf Manuel Deutsch (1525–1571) was a Swiss artist. He made several of the woodcuts for De re metallica (the metals and mining treatise by Georgius Agricola, the "father of mineralogy") and for Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia (the widely circulated encyclopedic book published in 24 editions in several languages between 1544 and 1628).

Deutsch's father, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch (the Elder) and his brother Niklaus were also artists. The older Niklaus had taken the last name "Manuel", but all three also commonly used "Deutsch" as part of their names and signed their paintings with initials ending in "D".