Not a bit fair and balanced, no sir.

Pietro Aretino, in Titian's first portrait of him (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At 93, Jacques Barzun published From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present. Would that I could write so well at any age!

Here's a portrait of a passing character:

It is a temptation to credit The Renaissance with another new social type, the journalist. But that would be playing with the word type: the new age produced one specimen, not a type: [Pietro] Aretino [1492-1556], and he proved a sample of the kind not much in favor with the conscientious writer for the press today. The son of a cobbler and entirely self-educated, Aretino used his extraordinary narrative style in the vernacular tongue to purvey news in avisi (broadsheets) and letters that everybody wanted to read, because they were often scandalous. The persons and politics of the highly placed were his target,  and it has been thought the sometimes he used his information for blackmail. He could praise as well as ridicule and would receive propitiatory gifts, one from the French king, Francis I. The poet Ariosto put Aretino in his epic under a nickname that has stuck: "the scourge of princes." Nowadays it takes a staff of paid informers among the fashionable to keep a scandal sheet going. Being a Renaissance man, he did it alone. 

Aretino attached himself to various princes, rarely for very long until mid-career, when he settled in Venice and periodically published collections of his letters. He wrote plays and dialogues that are esteemed as high-class erotica. He was loyal to the friends he made among the painters, notably Titian, and led their appreciation by the public. He closed his career, predictably, with two works of devotion.

 Avetino as St. Bartholomew, displaying his flayed skin, in Michelangelo's The Last Judgment (1536-41)