LEONARDO DA VINCI E LA 'NATURA'

After a brief methodological premise, we reconstruct the concept of nature in Leonardo da Vinci’s thought, in the awareness of its partially indefinite and composite character. The reconstruction proceeds first by isolating a Stoic component as a basic feature that characterises all of Leonardo’s elaboration, and then by chronologically highlighting an ‘Ovidian’, a Hermetic-Neoplatonic and an Aristotelian component. The presentation concludes with two chapters in which the original developments imprinted by Leonardo on the notion of nature are reconstructed and can be summarized in the two concepts of «being of nothingness» and «mixtures». In this way, it is argued, Leonardo arrived in the final years of his life at a sort of immanentism nourished by Lucretian suggestions