Leonardo da Vinci

Not one of these ten planets sits in a mutable sign: five are cardinal and five fixed. Air takes four, fire three, water two and a single one earth. A chart with nothing in it that adapts, in the record of somebody who left notes on anatomy, flight, water and everything else, is the first contrast worth naming and it explains neither side. The record says Leonardo da Vinci left about fifteen finished paintings and thousands of pages of notes, written in mirror script.

Jupiter sits in hard contact with Saturn at under a fifth of a degree, the closest pairing here. The reading is expansion against caution: the swing between taking far too much on and taking nothing on, and timing that is repeatedly slightly wrong. Fifteen finished paintings set against thousands of pages of unfinished notes is that aspect stated as a biography, and this project does not often get a fit so plain. An artist who finished fifteen pictures and filled thousands of pages that were never meant for anybody else is the subject that aspect has to account for, and it does the job better than most.

The Sun sits at twenty six degrees of Aries, built around going first, whose cost is boredom with anything already won. The Moon answers from Scorpio at twenty one, where what is felt goes deep and is given away sparingly, and its sign is certain. It sits in easy contact with Uranus at four fifths of a degree, which is being comfortable with change: not frightened by upheaval, and finding routine harder than most people do. Jupiter sits on the last four arcminutes of Aquarius and Neptune on the first half degree of Libra. Four of the ten planets were retrograde. An anatomist who was also an engineer and also a painter had to find routine harder than most people do, which is what that contact says in plainer words.

Leonardo died at Amboise on 2 May 1519, at sixty seven. Pluto stood square the natal Mercury at one hundredth of a degree that day, which is about as exact as a transit gets, with Saturn directly opposite the natal Uranus at a fifth of a degree and Jupiter conjunct the natal Saturn at four fifths, so the sky was working this chart's own Jupiter to Saturn argument from the outside. The Moon was at its last quarter and forty six per cent lit. That is the phase that rethinks the whole premise rather than the details. The notebooks are much the larger half of what was left, and the record says they are written in mirror script, which is the one detail no chart would have predicted.