The conventions of "Courtly Love" heap praise upon a distant Other, the beautiful yet disdainful one who persists in refusing the lover's advances. Thus in a poem such as the Italian ballata La bionda treccia, the speaker laments the blissful agony of his love: from the opening refrain, he describes the golden blond locks of her hair, which have bound his mind to her heart. He compares her face to the sun, which melts him as it would pure snow. "In the midst of fire" he is happy, and yet pleads with the god of love that he may find some welcome in her eyes. The poem comes full circle and, consistent with its structural conventions, concludes with the same refrain describing her hair binding him: an endless knot. This Italian poem manages in its passion and in some of its images to escape the bounds of mere convention.

Likewise, Francesco Landini's musical setting of the poem escapes mere musical convention. True, he follows the musico-poetic form rather strictly: refrain, verse of two piedi (feet) and a return to the refrain music, a second verse, and a final refrain. He also sets the ballata for two voice parts, most common in the mid-century Italian secular traditions. Yet within those traditions he crafts an elegant and passionate duet. The two voices, both carrying the Italian text, carefully line out the alternating triple and compound meters of the ballata's dance-form origins. The composer sets the poetic phrases to lines of roughly equal length, also following dance conventions; the singers get nearly breathless pauses between phrases, and ornament the ends of each poetic line with fiorature, flowery duo melismas redolent of the Italian madrigal. Though the meter does not change at the start of the verses, Landini strongly marks the poetic break by a dramatic leap upwards in both voices to the limits of their range. Little wonder, hearing a piece such as La bionda treccia, that contemporary Florentines so often featured dancing to and singing of his ballate in their courtly domestic entertainments.

The great popularity of Landini's La bionda treccia even surpassed the secular courtly milieu. At least twice, the zealous lay confraternities of medieval Florence took its music as the basis for their Laude (praise music). Landini's music thus also served the sacred texts Or chr non piange and O Gesú Cristo padre, sung by "laudesi" in nightly prayer services beneath the Florentine churches.

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