This paper will explore the rhetoric of violence in the Dance of Death texts and images, and discuss the way it is communicated to the beholder/reader.  Death Personified commits a series of murders by word and image, effectively silencing and immobilizing the protagonists of the Dance: the dialogical structure of the text that bounces back and forth between aggressive Death and the passive, fearful men and women constitutes a dancing rhythm of violence and fear, which is mirrored in the alternation between the active movement of Death and the static quality of its victims.  Mocking and cruel, Death makes its sure way through the ranks of the dancers, robbing them of their tangibility, ability to move and ability to speak.  Using the examples of German, Spanish and English Dances, I explore the poetics of mortality and movement, and the resulting change brought upon the figures in Death’s procession: they are liminal creatures, not yet dead, but already not alive, positioned, as it were, on the threshold of passing.

            Another threshold, however, is at play here: the one that separates and blurs the world of the dancers and the world of the viewers.  Because the Dance of Death is meant in the words of one of its main protagonists, to represent a mirror for the beholders, the latter are invited, through a complex series of visual and verbal signs, to identify with the dancing figures.  Once this identification is complete, the viewers are left to experience the violence perpetrated upon their own doubles.  The disjunction between the beholder and the dancing double, however, here comes face to the fore, as Death’s violence serves two different purposes: it cuts short the life of the painted dancer, but it spares the viewer who, having learned and internalized the necessary lesson about the futility of human ambition and life, is left to prepare to part with both at a moment’s notice.