Quantulacumque lucretiana. Nuove piste di ricerca sulla fortuna di Lucrezio nel tardo Rinascimento

Abstract

This essay collects evidence of Lucretius’s presence

in areas where researchers have not ventured, convinced

that he was largely a poet who was read for excerpting

precious images but disregarded his materialistic

ideas. This essay proves that he was read by literary theorists,

mithographers, meteorologists, embryologists, scholars

interested in magnetism, and in the causes of dreams.

The quotations culled in this paper point out new paths of

investigation, and prove by and large that in Italy Lucretius

was held as a serious observer of natural phenomena

long before Gassendi made him popular by the middle of

the Seventeenth Century.