Francis Bacon

Six of his ten planets sit in cardinal signs with only one fixed, and the elements come out three apiece in fire, air and water with a single one in earth. The record says Bacon painted screaming popes and distorted figures in a studio so chaotic it was moved to Dublin and reassembled item by item, and that he had no formal training.

A grand cross closes on Mercury, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, which is the most pressed figure a chart can make: four planets at right angles all the way round, with no outlet anywhere. Saturn sits square Neptune at three quarters of a degree inside it, pressure against something that will not hold a shape. An artist who worked without training in a room nobody could tidy, on figures that will not stay in one piece, has the most structurally stressed arrangement in this set, and that is a description rather than a diagnosis.

Venus sits in easy contact with Saturn at six hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here and close enough to call exact, which is steady affection and an unfashionable preference for the durable over the exciting. That reads against everything else in the chart, which is worth saying rather than smoothing over. Venus also stands at an awkward angle to Neptune at two thirds. His Moon sits at twenty nine degrees of Aries at noon and may have reached Taurus, so it is left out. An artist the record says had no formal training at all is the person that steady contact has to belong to, and the chart does not explain how both are true.

He died at Madrid on 28 April 1992, at eighty two, on his own Uranus return: the transiting Uranus stood conjunct its natal place at under half a degree, with Neptune directly opposite its own natal degree at four tenths the same day. Both of those planets were also squaring his natal Saturn, which is a point of the grand cross, so the two slowest things in the sky were working the figure his chart is built on. The Moon was at its last quarter and nineteen per cent lit. That is the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details.