ABSTRACT
A recent article by Giulio Cattin offers a magnificent view of what is known about the poets for Italian fifteenth-century song. But one aspect of the article's importance is the way it draws attention to areas that need further study, of which the most spectacular may be the case of Leonardo Giustinian. This chapter aims to suggest that the doubts go back to an earlier state of literary knowledge. Recent developments in musical knowledge give powerful reasons for accepting all but one of these poems as the work of Leonardo Giustinian. Leonardo Giustinian died, after a long and distinguished career in Venetian politics, in 1446. Only one of the poems with musical settings appears in the current complete edition of Giustinian s canzonette, that of Bertold Wiese, published in 1883.
