Despite the historical proximity and shared intellectual inheritances of Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino, Cusanus is remarkably absent as a source in the Ficinian corpus. Ficino's De Amore and Cusanus' De Visione Dei describe love as a bond between God and creation, whereby being proceeds as an act of God's providential love and returns as an act of conversive love. Their divergence, this paper argues, lies in Cusanus's emphasis on the immediacy of love's unitive bond, in contrast to Ficino's insistence on the necessity of metaphysical mediation. Cusanus describes God as "Loving Love" and "Lovable Love," and as the point at which the two loves are united. Filial love arises when the creature recognizes itself as the object of God's paternal love; in this recognition, God and creature are united through their shared capacity to love and be loved. Cusanus thus emphasises the immediacy of the relation between created beings and God, grounded in the recognition that paternal love precedes and embraces all creation. Though still unified and unifying, the bond Ficino describes in De Amore operates through a hierarchy of mediation as it unfolds into multiplicity and reverts to simplicity. Conversive love first occurs, for Ficino, as Intellect turns to its source. Because the natures of all things are contained within Intellect, the capacity of effects to love their causes is intrinsic to Ficino's vertical model of causality. Unlike Cusanus' account, Ficino's hierarchical structure requires that both providential and conversive love operate through intermediary levels within the cosmic order. Ficino's account of the birth of conversive love within the reflexive formation of Intellect, and Cusanus' grounding of love directly in the divine essence, therefore yield distinct accounts of the relation between lover and beloved.