The popularity of Fuzuli’s romance Leyla ve Mecnun is probably unmatched by any other pre-modern Turkish/Turkic romance. Acknowledging that the work is a product of literary imitation, most scholars agree that it is an original masterpiece. Based on the premise that in the self-consciously intertextual mode of literary creation of the Persico-Turkic literary tradition, understanding the relation between the imitating work and its model was an essential component of understanding and appreciating the new work itself, the paper discusses how Fuzuli’s elaboration of the Leyla ve Mecnun departed from its model, Nizami Gencevi and how it relates to previous other elaborations of the topic. More specifically, it discusses on one hand the protagonist’s nocturnal supplication to the stars and the planets, a cosmological journey which evokes Nizami Gencevi; on the other hand it presents Mecnun’s soliloquy on the complementary relation of beauty and love, a paradigmatic discussion which, however, is not found in Fuzuli’s models and seems to be his own innovation. I intend to establish how Fuzuli departed from his models and what these differences may reveal about the aesthetics he followed.