Orpheus1.0022_Bronzino

A young, nude male figure with curly hair looks at the viewer, holding a violin and a musical bow, with a dog beside him

Orpheus plays his musical instrument — not a lyre, but here a viola da gamba — for Cerberus. The fiery depths of the Underworld rage in the distance beyond his right shoulder.

The suitor, whose image is presented in this advertisement, becomes especially attractive through the comparison to Orpheus, the most courageous lover of all time. He married Eleonora of Toledo in 1539, perhaps the very year of this portrait.

Is the suggestion here that a betrothal to Cosimo de' Medici I might assure that all interests would be watched with equal fidelity and courage as were Eurydice's by Orpheus?
Orpheus:Eurydice::Cosimo:_____
(Insert your name here, if you agree to marry this guy.) ...
Or, perhaps the theme is political: Cosimo can temper civil revolt as he once tempered the ravings of Cerberus. Such a theme was taken up two decades earlier by Baccio Bandinelli in his marble Orpheus for the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi.

"It is a double-layered image in which Cosimo is at once himself and Orpheus. . . The Duke is thus linked to a new Orpheus, echoing the political theme of a Medici ruler as a Florentine peacemaker that Bandinelli had introduced in the previous generation in his marble Orpheus ..." J. Cox-Rearick in DIA The Medici, p. 154.