He entered the Canons Regular of the Congregation of St Mark; he went to Rome under Julius II, was most welcome to Leo X, and became closely acquainted with the leading literary figures of the time: Bembo, Sadoleto, Tebaldeo, Castiglione, praised for his gentleness of character and purity of conduct, admired for his facile poetic vein, and devoted especially to the study of Virgil. He first held the priorate of St Sylvester near Frascati, then the prepositorship of St Lawrence at Monticelli and the priorate of St Pelagia in the diocese of Cremona, of his own congregation. Under Clement VII he is recorded as “notarius, familiari continuus commensalis”; until the same Pope on 7 February 1533 appointed him bishop of Alba. In June 1546 he was at the Council of Trent. For his diocese in 1562 he promulgated the Constitutions synodales.
Works from his youth include the *Schachias ludus*, 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 I of France he composed the *Poeticorum libri tres*. Greater fame came to him from the much-admired poem in six books, the *Christias*, published in print in 1535 but written much earlier, for which he was acclaimed the Christian Virgil, in which without mythological fictions, with full sincerity of soul, he elegantly sang of Christian Redemption. He dedicated to Cardinal Pole the treatise *De reipublicae dignitate*. Hymns, orations, eulogies, odes of varied tone complete his literary output, “of lofty eloquence and inexhaustible vein,” as Ariosto said (*Orlando Furioso*, XLVI, 13).