The first and proper companion of mines: Water and ore generation in Biringuccio’s De la Pirotechnia (1540)

According to a widespread Renaissance notion, mineral ores were formed by the combination and condensation of moist and dry vapors produced underground by solar heat. In agreement with this model, the differences in the seven classical metals – gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, mercury – were generally thought to result from the influence of celestial bodies on different proportions of the two essential constituents of these vapors: sulphur and mercury. The Italian metallurgist and minter Vannoccio Biringuccio (1480–1539) was one of the earliest practitioners who openly questioned this interpretation in a published text. He did so largely, although not exclusively, on the basis of his first-hand experience in mines. As Biringuccio wrote in his treatise De la Pirotechnia (‘On Pyrotechnics’), he could not believe sulphur or quicksilver to be the essential constituents of all metals, he having ‘never seen metallic ores grow near sulphur or mercury ores’. As the following decades would show, these and other remarks were harbingers of a conceptual turn in the study of the mineral world, a change where alchemical and classical knowledge, empirical evidence, and natural philosophy interacted in different yet substantial ways and led to new understandings of the role of water in mineral processes.