The Apocalypse
British Museum, London
Rating: ****

Wandering among the glass cabinets in the British Museum's department of prints and drawings, you find yourself poring over interpretations of the Book of Revelation and seeing the same images of ruin down the centuries: St John of Patmos eating the book, the angel who opens the Seventh Seal and pours a "fiery incense" on the earth, causing earthquakes, floods and massacres, the Four Horsemen - the Conqueror, War, Famine and, behind them, Death on a Pale Horse.

Exhibiting all this stuff on the millennium's eve is great fun, but makes for a mad, occulted labyrinth of an exhibition. To enjoy it you have to become a fanatic, scrutinising scores of prints for signs of the end. The British Museum has the best collection of prints in the world. Here there is a clumsy, populist gesture in adding a papier mache tableau of the Mexican Day of the Dead and a few film stills to what should really be a more lucid unveiling.

None the less, it is weirdly addictive. You can glut on catastrophe and horror. Here are the Four Horsemen in Albrecht Durer's engravings published in 1498, riding across the earth with fierce determination, crushing peasants and burghers. Durer's hard, firm line makes his Horsemen terrifyingly mechanical.

Many saw the Apocalypse as a consummation devoutly to be wished. There is a drawing of Britain's destruction by Jonathan Martin, brother of the Victorian apocalyptic painter John Martin. Jonathan tried to make his vision come true by setting fire to Yorkminster - and ended up in Bedlam. For the dispossessed, the apocalypse was not just the end but a beginning - when the new Jerusalem appears. William Blake's hand-coloured prints for his book Jerusalem are juxtaposed with two millennarian prophets from the turn of the 19th century, Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott.

Brothers, self-styled "Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty", created an architectural blueprint for the New Jerusalem. Sixty-five year old Southcott said she would give birth to Shiloh, whose coming would mark the beginning of Revelation. She died childless.

The apocalypse dissolves in art after the first world war; the 20th century unveiled things that make the Book of Revelation seem almost cosy.

• British Museum, Great Russell Street, London, WC1 (020 7636 1555) until April 24

***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible