ALKEMIJSKA POEMA DANIJELA KOPRANINA

Abstract

The fourteenth-century alchemic poem by Daniel Just inopolitanus, teacher of grammar in Koper, Slovenia and Pula, Croatia, is almost unk nown of in the history of science. Today the text is located in St Mark’s Library in V enice. In 1599, it was published in Della Tramutatione metallica, an anthology edited b y Giovanni Battista Nazari. This article gives an interpretation of the poem, s howing that Daniel was actually explaining how to make the Philosopher’s stone. His argument is based on the hermet- ic statement that similar produces similar, and the refore, “natural gold produces syn- thetic[goldÆ”. Daniel also determined the role of t he Stone in the preparation of an elixir, or universal cure. The value of Daniel’s poem is that it makes a disti nction between “true” and “false” alchemies. “True” alchemy is the skill by which the Stone can be made from natural gold, rather than from the distillation of organic substances, which was the tradition of Arabic and medieval alchemy.