(b Venice, c1383; d Venice, 10 Nov 1446). Italian poet, humanist and statesman. From one of Venice’s leading families, he studied in Padua soon after 1400, married Lucrezia di Bernardino da Mula in 1405, joined the Maggior consiglio of Venice in 1407, and was appointed procuratore of S Marco in 1444. As a pupil of Guarino Veronese and Gasparino Barzizza he was in touch with many leading humanists.
His Italian poetry can be divided into four main genres: the devotional laude (see Luisi), for which there is some music, albeit without any distinctive style; the strambotti, heavily contested in authorship and with no known musical settings; the extended love poems in his Canzoniere (ed. in Wiese, Poesie, 1883, based on I-Fn Pal.213; necessary completions from F-Pn it.1032 are in Wiese, ‘Zu den Liedern’, 1883), apparently the basis for the unwritten singing to the lute for which he was famous in his own day (see Pirrotta, 1972); and the shorter and perhaps earlier poems included in the posthumous Il fiore delle … canzonette del … Lunardo Iustiniano (Venice, c1472 and 12 later editions; those not also found in the Canzoniere are ed. Wiese, 1885). This last volume contains all the poems ascribed to Giustiniani that survive in polyphonic settings before about 1480; but of its 30 poems at least four are definitely spurious, so many writers have doubted the authority of the others (the case for accepting them is outlined in Fallows). All his poetry has a relaxed and informal style that betokens a new direction in Italian literature; much use is made of Venetian dialect, ‘translated’ into more formal Italian for the manuscripts used in the only available modern edition of his Canzoniere.
B. Wiese, ed.: Poesie edite ed inedite di Giustiniani (Bologna, 1883)
B. Wiese: ‘Zu den Liedern Lionardo Giustinianis’, Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie, xvii (1883), 256–76
B. Wiese: ‘Neunzehn Lieder Leonardo Giustinianis nach den alten Drucken’, Bericht vom Schuljahre 1884–85 über das grossherzogliche Realgymnasium zu Ludwigslust, xiv (Ludwigslust, 1885), 4
B. Fenigstein: Leonardo Giustiniani (1383?–1446): venezianischer Staatsmann, Humanist und Vulgärdichter (Halle, 1909)
L. Pini: ‘Per l’edizione critica delle canzonette di Leonardo Giustinian (indice e classificazioni dei manoscritti e delle stampe antiche)’, Atti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei: classe di scienzi morali, storiche, critiche e filologiche, 8th ser., ix (1960), 419–543
N. Pirrotta: ‘Ricercare e variazioni su “O rosa bella”’, Studi musicali, i (1972), 59–77
F. Luisi: Laudario giustinianeo (Venice, 1983)
D. Fallows: ‘Leonardo Giustinian and Quattrocento Polyphonic Song’, L’edizione critica tra testo musicale e testo letterario: Cremona 1992, 247–60
DAVID FALLOWS