VIDA, GIROLAMO. - Bishop and poet, b. in 1490 at Cremona, d. at Alba on 27 Sept. 1566.
He entered the Canons Regular of the Congregation of St. Mark; he moved to Rome under Julius II, was most welcome to Leo X and became intimate with the best representatives of the literary life of the time: Bembo, Sadoleto, Tebaldeo, Castiglione, praised for mildness of spirit and blamelessness of conduct, admired for his facile poetic vein, informed above all by the study of Virgil. He first held the priory of St. Sylvester near Frascati, then the provostship of St. Lawrence of Monticelli and the priory of St. Pelagia in the diocese of Cremona, of his congregation. Under Clement VII he is remembered as « notarius, familiaris continuus commensalis »; until the same Pope on 7 Feb. 1533 appointed him bishop of Alba. In June 1546 he was at the Council of Trent. For his diocese in 1562 he promulgated the Constitutiones synodales.
Works of his youth are: Schachinidius in which in 608 hexameters he describes a game of chess between Apollo and Mercury, and the other short poem Bombycorum libri duo, on the rearing of silkworms, dedicated to Isabella Gonzaga; for Francis, dauphin of France, he composed Poeticorum libri tres. Greater fame was procured for him by the much-admired poem in 6 books: Christus, published in print in 1535, but written much earlier, for which he was proclaimed the Christian Virgil, in which without mythological fictions, with full sincerity of spirit, he elegantly sang the Christian Redemption. He dedicated to Card. Pole the treatise De reipublicae dignitate. Hymns, orations, eclogues, odes of varying tone complete his literary production « d'alta facondia inessicabili vena », as Ariosto said (Orl. Fur., XLVI, 13).
Bibliography5 works
Pio Paschini