Holofernes
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- For the Shakespeare character, see Love's Labour's Lost.
Holofernes (Hebrew, הולופרנס) was an Assyrian [1] invading general of Nebuchadnezzar, who appears in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith. It was said that the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar dispatched Holofernes to take vengeance on the nations of the west that had withheld their assistance to his reign. The general laid siege to Bethulia, commonly believed to be Meselieh, and the city almost surrendered. It was saved by Judith, a beautiful Jewish widow who entered Holofernes's camp and seduced him. Judith then beheaded Holofernes while he was drunk. She returned to Bethulia with the decapitated head, and the Jews defeated the enemy.
The beheading of Holofernes by Judith was a subject for several works of art by such names as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Andrea Mantegna, Giorgione, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Caravaggio, Horace Vernet, Gustav Klimt, Artemisia Gentileschi, Jan Sanders van Hemessen and Hermann-Paul. Their story also inspired a medieval Old English poem, Mozart's opera Betulia Liberata, a play by Abraham Goldfaden, and oratorio by Antonio Vivaldi, and an operetta by Jacob Pavlovitch Adler. Also, Michelangelo depicts the scene in multiple aspects in one of the Pendentives, or four spandrels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Holofernes is to be found on the Terrace of pride in Dante's Purgatorio.
