Salvador Dali

Photo Mosaic

Salvador Dali melted clocks over a barren landscape and painted the inside of the dreaming mind so precisely that the whole world remembers it. Born in Figueres, Catalonia, in 1904, he trained as a classicist, drifted through Cubism, then joined the Surrealists in 1929 and became their most flamboyant star. The Persistence of Memory, finished in 1931, is still one of the most famous paintings ever made. His chart tells you exactly how such a peculiar genius held together.

His Sun sits in Taurus, the earthy, Venusian pillar, the connoisseur with unshakeable opinions and a jeweller's eye for value and beauty, which is why his draughtsmanship stayed so precise even at his most bizarre. That Sun shines in the eleventh house of tribe and network, the hero who founds his own franchise, and Dali built exactly that: a one-man brand of publicity and provocation, no team, no shared throne.

His Moon in Aries in the ninth burned Martian and childlike, restless, fed by philosophy, mysticism and faraway ideas, later returning to Catholicism and his "nuclear mysticism." Cancer rising gave him that watchful shell over the theatrics. He remained, always, his own strangest creation.