MUZIO, GIROLAMO. — Scholar and polemicist, who proclaimed himself a Giustinopolitano from his native city (Capodistria), born in Padua on 12 March 1496 to Cristoforo Nuzio (Muzio also altered his family name), died at Paneretta (Florence) in 1576.
The need to provide for himself compelled him to enter the service of various lords; he traveled in Italy, Germany, France, and Switzerland; he was with Alfonso d’Avalos, marquis of Vasto, then with Ferrante Gonzaga in Milan, with the dukes of Urbino in Pesaro and Urbino, and in Rome with Pius IV, from whom he received a pension; he married; he was a scholar and a prolific writer of versatile intellect. Only around 1550 did he begin to publish his first proofs of genius.
Passionate about chivalric matters, he published a work on Duelling (1550), later three dialogues on The Gentleman (1575); he wrote on language, in opposition to the principles of Varchi, on poetry and composed poetry as well, including 35 Eclogues in blank verse; he printed an Epistolary (1551), and many other letters were published in recent times. He also edited the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love by Tullia d’Aragona, to whose friendship he had remained faithful for twenty years. Greater importance attaches to his religious polemics: almost alone in his time in this field, he was an effective and vigorous polemicist, though sometimes inclined to overstep in both his judgments and his expressions. The flight of Pier Paolo Vergerio, bishop of Capodistria (May 1549), to Switzerland, and the excuses he wished to offer for it, induced Muzio to publish in 1550, in four books, the Vergerianae, that is, the correspondence he had previously exchanged with Vergerio and his friends, in order to refute his assertions (cf. P. Paschini, Pier Paolo Vergerio il Giovane, Rome 1925, pp. 113 ff.). The outcome of this work led him in 1551 to publish the Mentitae Ochinianae, collecting what he had written after 1542 concerning the flight of Bernardino Ochino in polemic with him (cf. B. Nicolini, G. M. e Bernardino Ochino, in Biblion. Rivista di bibliografia, Naples 1946, pp. 9 ff., where at p. 39 there is also the most recent bibliography on Muzio). Less important is Muzio’s controversy with Francesco Betti, a Roman gentleman who, having fled to Basel in 1557 with a public manifesto, had sought to justify his step. Only in 1571 did he publish in Venice four books of Lettere catholicae, written in preceding years, in which among other things he showed insight into the evils afflicting the Church. He also polemicized with Bullinger and Viret.