Biringuccio calcination

The fact that metals gained weight when roasted was noted, at least by some observers and for some metals, for hundreds of years before the phenomenon was adequately explained. One of the earliest such reports can be found in Vannoccio Biringuccio's 1540 treatise, De La Pirotechnia.

The calcination of lead in a reverberatory furnace seems to me to be such a fine and important thing that I cannot pass it by in silence. For it is found in effect that the body of the metal increases in weight to 8 or perhaps 10 per hundred more than it was before it was calcined. This is a remarkable thing when we consider that the nature of fire is to consume everything with a diminution of substance, and for this reason the quantity of weight ought to decrease, yet actually it is found to increase.

We know, as Biringuccio did not, that calcination is really oxidation, the reaction of the metal with oxygen. If a single lead oxide is formed in this operation, what is its formula?

Reference

Vannoccio Biringuccio, De La Pirotechnia (1540), translation by Cyril Stanley Smith & Martha Teach Gnudi (New York: Basic Books, 1959) Book I, chapter 4, p. 58.

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