Leonardo and Lucretius (and De Rerum Natura in Italy)

This looks to be a good article (PDF, by Marco Baretta, University of Bologna, 2009) about Leonardo da Vinci and includes history and reception of De Rerum Natura in Italy.

Excerpt:

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Aware of the difficulties that may be encountered in any research on sources,

in this examination of the ties between Leonardo and Lucretius I have adopted

an approach that is intended to circumvent at least some of the obstacles men-

tioned above. While I have sought to identify the significant correspondences

between passages written by the two, it seemed to me necessary first and fore-

most to demonstrate that Lucretius was such a well-known author in the circles

frequented by Leonardo in Florence and Pavia that it would have been difficult,

if not impossible, for the artist to have remained unaware of the discussions of

certain themes that had been sparked by the diffusion of the poem. Therefore,

the historical and intellectual context in which Leonardo moved will form the

basis here for an interpretation of the text.

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Here is a bit more about De Rerum Natura in Italy:

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Lucretius in Florence

The period in which Leonardo conducted his work as an artist and scien-

tist coincided with the rediscovery of Lucretius and various aspects of the natu-

ral philosophy of Epicureanism. Although the text of De rerum natura had been

circulating for some time in manuscript form, the editio princeps was only print-

ed in 1473 in Brescia and, judging from the great rarity of the edition, in very

few copies.3 Other editions followed in Verona (1486) and Venice (1495),

culminating in 1500 with the first of two by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius,

this one edited by Geronimo Avancio. The first commented edition, by Giovan

Battista Pio, was published in Bologna in 1511.4 It was followed one year later

by an edition printed in Florence by Filippo Giunta that – thanks primarily to

the scrupulous work of Michele Marullo – offered readers a text purged of nu-

merous errors. The editor, Pier Candido, dedicated his work to Tommaso So-

derini, a Florentine statesman who knew Machiavelli well 5 and was a great ad-

mirer of Leonardo. Eight years earlier, in 1504, the Florentine mathematician

Raffaele Francus had dedicated In Lucretium paraphrasis cum appendicem de an-

imi immortalitatem 6 to Soderini (Fig. 1). This treatise was published in Bologna

by Giovanni Antonio Benedetti, the father of Girolamo Benedetti, who was the

printer responsible for the 1511 edition of De rerum natura by Giovan Battista

Pio, as well as numerous other scientific texts.

In the annals of Italian typography, the Lucretian revival concluded in 1515

with the second edition of De rerum natura printed by Aldus Manutius, this one

edited by Andrea Navagero. Two years before the death of Leonardo, during a

synod held in Florence in 1517 after the Fifth Lateran Council, the Church for-

mally banned the study of Lucretius in schools.7 Although this measure was less

restrictive than those applying to works considered to be heretical, De rerum nat-

ura would not be published again in Italy until 1647, in an edition prepared by

Giovanni Nardi, physician to Ferdinando II de Medici.

No attempts to translate the text of Lucretius are known of before 1530,...

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