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 cardinalFerdinando 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.
Campbell, G. (2003). "Muzio, Girolamo". The Oxford Dictionary of the Renaissance. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-860175-3. Retrieved 7 July 2023.