“And behold, a pale horse; and he that sat upon him his name was Death. And hell followed him; and power was given to him over the four parts of the earth, to kill with sword, with famine and with death…

“And behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair; and the whole moon became as blood…

“And the heaven departed as a book folded up; and every mountain, and the islands, were moved out of their places…”

The graphic language of Apocalypse - composed at the end of the first century AD to bind early Christian communities together against sectarianism from within and Roman persecution from without - has inspired artists for nearly two thousand years and may be counted responsible for some of the scariest images in the canon of Western art. “The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come”, the latest in a succession of learned but vividly accessible exhibitions at the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings, is a thrilling and often rather disconcerting journey through the imagination of apocalypticists and millennarians from the Middle Ages to the present. Meanwhile, at the National Gallery, a show built around Botticelli’s spiritually agitated masterpiece of 1499, The Mystic Nativity, may remind us with renewed force that Renaissance man - so often seen as a coolly rational being, bent solely on classical revival and scientific discovery - was himself by no means immune to the doomy imaginings of apocalyptic prophecy. Botticelli, who painted the National Gallery’s painting (as he indicates in an inscription written upon it) in anticipation of the imminent end of the world, was inspired by the charismatic Dominican friar Savonarola. Savonarola had systematically terrorised the population of Florence in the late 1490s with his sermons, inflaming the popular imagination by staging so-called “bonfires of the vanities”, demonstrations of anti-materialist spiritual fervour during which people piled their luxuries into pyres and then watched as they were torched. (Savonarola himself was burned alive for heresy in 1498.)

Exhibitions such as these satisfy a typically modern, somewhat voyeuristic attitude to the idea that the end of the world is just around the corner. Despite the huge encouragement traditionally offered to eschatological mania by a calendrical number as big as 2000, the fact is that we no longer really believe in the ancient Judaeo-Christian notion of an absolute, sudden end to the world (unless, that is, we happen to be Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, or members of the Heaven’s Gate sect of California - who in 1996, it may be remembered, put the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet together with an over-literal reading of Apocalypse and commited mass suicide). But even though the vast majority of us cannot bring ourselves to have faith in the notion of absolute ending we seem still to be nostalgically fascinated by those of our ancestors who held fast to such a belief. Looking at the images which they left behind them, strange and startling keepsakes of ancient fear and fervour, we find in them, perhaps, a palliative to our own comparatively anticlimactic attitude to the imminent end of another thousand years.

The artists of the Middle Ages made the first really ambitious attempts to represent the seemingly unrepresentable episodes described in the Book of Apocalypse. They squeezed the events of the final conflict, the end of the world and the universal reckoning within the confines of the illuminated manuscript. The Winchester Psalter, which dates from the mid-twelfth century, contains one of the most memorable pictures to survive from medieval England. An angel locks the door on hell, seen as a gaping monster within whose mouth the cramped and confined figures of the damned wriggle like bacilli under a microscope. The ingenious and energetic Frances Carey, who organised the British Museum’s exhibition, believes that “after the great manuscript cycles of the Middle Ages, the defining moment in the development of the pictorial tradition was Durer’s publication of his 15 Apocalypse woodcuts in 1498.”

Carey is a specialist in prints, and possibly a little biased. There will be those who feel that Luca Signorelli’s astonishingly violent, magnificently threatening frescoes in Orvieto Cathedral - with their rainstorms of blood and their unforgettable depictions of the Antichrist, the beast with the number 666, as a sinister dark-eyed double of Jesus Christ himself  - are equally strong contestants for the palm she awards to Durer. But there is no denying the power of the great German artist’s woodcuts, and precisely because they were prints, seen by multitudes, it is probably fair to say that they succeeded in putting the fear of God into more people than any other images created before their time. Urged on by an avenging angel in the sky, Durer’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse advance pitilessly on a crowd of stricken figures who stand for all of humanity. One of them is a king, his crowned head already half-swallowed up by the maw of hell - which Durer depicted as a kind of dragon-cum-dog. The politically subversive implications of Apocalypse contributed to its mass popularity. It was a subject well calculated to appeal to the disenfranchised and the poor, for after all, at the end of the world, distinctions of rank and class cannot be said to count for very much.

St John’s Apocalypse was always one of the most controversial texts in the Bible, being the last Book to be given a place in the New Testament. Even after its inclusion there were those who feared its potentially inflammatory effect on men’s minds - and history has proved them right on more than one occasion. The Reformation sparked an explosion of apocalyptic imagery, as the terrors predicted in the Bible became steadily more entangled, in many people’s minds, with the actual events of their troubled time. The opposition between Protestant and Catholic could easily be made to seem like a realisation of St John’s violent and powerfully ambiguous prophecies. Large numbers of Christian believers became convinced that the final conflict was on the point of being played out and contemporary images encouraged them in their beliefs. The evil monsters that swarm through St John’s vision, such as Antichrist and the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, were often given pope’s mitres, while Catholic priests were cast as instruments of the devil. There is something more than a little chilling about such works of art, a form of virulent propaganda which must be held at least partly responsible for the massacre of some 23,000 Catholics by radical Lutherans during the sack of the Rome in 1527. People are capable of extraordinary atrocities when they believe their enemies really are the followers of the Antichrist.