Girolamo Muzio was born at Padua in 1496, and educated there. He was honoured by
Pope Leo X with the title of Cavalier; and he was in the service of the marquis del Vasto; after whose death he passed into the service of Don
Ferdinando Gonzaga, whose affairs he managed at several Italian courts. The duke of Urbino next appointed him governor to his son, afterwards duke
Francesco II. He was afterwards in the service of
cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici. He died in 1576. In 1551 he published, along with other Italian poems, his
Arte Poetica, in three books, composed in
blank verse. Besides letters, histories, moral treatises, he wrote several tracts against the
Reformers, especially those of the Italian nation, who at that time were numerous. He first attacked
Vergerio. He then contended with
Ochino, and Betti; and he afterwards assailed
Bullinger,
Viret, and others. As a counterbalance to the Protestant writers of ecclesiastical history, called the
Magdeburg Centuriators, Muzio, in 1570, published a Roman Catholic history of the two first centuries, which made up in polemic zeal for what it wanted in sound erudition. Muzio's works on the
Italian language, published as the ''Battaglie per diffesa dell'italica lingua
(1582), include a defence of the vernacular against claims for the superiority of Latin, and the Varchina'', in which Muzio attacks
Benedetto Varchi's pro-Florentine
Ercolano while upholding his own ideal of an Italian learned from books. ==Works==