ALCIATI della MOTTA, GIAN PAOLO. — A Milanese Socinian, according to some; according to others, a native of Savigliano in Piedmont; born around 1510 and died at Danzig in 1580. At first he devoted himself to a military career, but later joined the Antitrinitarian conventicle of Vicenza, subsequently taking refuge in Geneva when, in 1546, it was dissolved by the Venetian government. Having gone to the Grisons, he took part in the struggles that arose there between Antitrinitarians and Zwinglians. Returning to Geneva around 1554, he refused to subscribe to the confession of faith presented to him by Calvin, and was forced to flee.
Calvin, who spared no epithets for his opponents, called him «a mind not merely dull, but frenzied to the point of madness». Beza accused him of having become a Muslim, but this was an arbitrary inference drawn from a letter that A. had written to Gregorio Paulo, in which he had stated that, in his opinion, the doctrine of the Muslims was more consonant with reason than that of the Christians, who recognized three Persons in a single nature. From 1562 until 1574, the year in which he had to withdraw to Danzig, he propagated his Antitrinitarian doctrines in Poland, with excursions into Moravia and Transylvania, teaching chiefly orally and in writing that Jesus Christ was inferior to the Father, that he was a simple man, and that he did not exist before his birth. He was BINA, ANDREA (v.) and of the other Antitrinitarians who followed Sozzino.
pino, 22 (1920), p. 12 ff.; C. F. Church, The Italian Reformers, New York 1932; D. Cantimori, Eretici Italiani del Cinquecento, Florence 1939, pp. 214 ff., 222 ff.