well, at some point in the future.`The Apocalypse and the Shape of Things to Come’, British Museum, London WC1 (0171-636 1555) daily, until 24 Apr. Either way, I’m not sure that it is a very helpful perspective on life And perhaps we might put it behind us in the next… This is just what one feels with, say, Frans Masereel’s 1940 Apocalypse of Our Time drawings. They are not really the anti-war statement that they think they are. On the other hand, although they appear in this show, Otto Dix’s First World War etchings should really be credited with resisting an apocalyptic tone.

Their horrible spectacles retain a saving sense of the inappropriate.Apocalypse, now, is normally a posture of exasperated despair – rather than of deranged, millenarian optimism (though, of course, that still exists). It’s more that such visions tend to anaesthetise the horror they are trying overwhelmingly to express, to make it seem remote and tremendous and inevitable. And Revelation has, of course, a happy ending; the righteous win. But in this century, as I can still just call it, the focus has been narrower and more negative. Artists have invoked the apocalypse in response to dreadful things happening, like modern war and eco-disaster Only the destructive episodes of Revelation are stressed It’s an image of unmitigated catastrophe.

The end of the world is, indeed, the end of the world, with no new Jerusalem in view beyond.Actually, apocalyptic visions seem a very unwise response to evil. It’s not just (the perhaps pedantic point) that in the book itself, most of the really destructive activity is sponsored by God. The Blake pictures are really the first to allow the subject decently Wagnerian dimensions – not actually by showing a lot of view, but by clear suggestions that these great actions are happening in an infinite space.The other big change of apocalyptic sensibility is a 20th-century one. When, previously, apocalypse imagery had been used to dramatise political struggles and wars, the focus was combative – a way of stressing the urgency, magnitude or righteousness of the cause, the awfulness of the enemy. But still, the last battles of the universe always seem to be fought out on an area not much bigger than a football pitch. The 16th-century engravings of Jean Duvet make a real effect of such density, to the point where there’s so much uninterrupted detail that you can hardly tell what’s happening. Nowadays, we feel that events of cosmic significance should occur on a correspondingly cosmic scale We want more of a sense of scape.

We expect huge vistas – the Earth and the heavens in convulsion, the new Jerusalem spread out further than they eye can see.But before the 19th century, the scale is quaint True, scenes may be absolutely jam-packed with figures. But no, the author of Revelation was also a numerological headbanger, and if he had specifically meant three heads with two horns and four with one horn, he would have specifically said so What he meant was seven heads and 10 horns. Visualising it was not his business, and any plausible visualisation will probably be untrue to the text.On the other hand, Durer’s image of the beast is a piece of genius – the way the hideous, writhing heads become a bunch of individual crooks, snarling, skulking, sneering and (this is the brilliant touch) preening themselves. And the whole series, cut in 1498 when he was only 26, is so authoritative that it almost supersedes the text it illustrates.Still, even the Durer scenes may strike us as not quite rising to the occasion. Seven heads are fitted in by imagining a hydra-like bunch of serpents emerging from a single neck (this is an old, medieval solution). As for the 10 horns, they’re distributed by giving four heads one and three heads two Fair enough, you may think. Revelation is the devil to illustrate, especially if you are obliged to stick to the letter of it.