MOLZA, FRANCESCO MARIA. – Scholar, born in Modena on 18 June 1489, died there on 28 February 1544. Besides Latin and Greek, he had some knowledge of Hebrew. Despite a past marked by unbridled sensuality, he loved, with the passion of a humanist, the Rome of Julius II and his successors. He belonged to almost all the academies, and, with perhaps more relish than any other, to that of the Vignaiuoli, along with Fiorenzuola, Berni, and even Della Casa. He played a leading role in the reputation for Roman humanist corruption. He was one of the most characteristic figures of Rome, and thus of Italy; this is attested by letters and memoirs.
His Latin and vernacular poetry was overrated even by his contemporaries; yet, apart from the good intentions of Cardinal Farnese, who had him at his court, it was published only two centuries later, in 1747, by Abbot Serassi. Four of his novellas had been published in 1459. His pastoral poem La ninfa ti-berina is praised. In art, too, M. may be compared to his friend Firenzuola. In verse or prose, both needed subjects that did not demand more than their imagination. When feeling had to be drawn upon, as in the Stanze per Giulia Gonzaga (not all of which are his) or in those On the Death of Alvigi Gonzaga, even the imagination faltered. His epigrams and capitoli were ineffective. A failed humorist, he is also in the poem In Praise of Figs, which remained famous among scholars for the note by Annibale Caro. A genuine humanist, he may have set more store by his Latin poems, in which, however, he was little more than an imitator, particularly of Tibullus. When Erasmus, in the Ciceronianus, seemed to adopt some Lutheran arguments against the piety of humanists, M. reacted with indignation in which everything may be questioned (perhaps even the right to express it), but not its sincerity.