For an unofficial but illuminating prologue to the British Museum's Durer show, you need to go past the ticket desk, through the tapering Mycenaean columns and on into one of the strangest and most magical galleries in the building. In this long room devoted to pre-Hellenic Greece, among the rows of pots painted with electrified sea life and planet-eyed birds, is an image of a bull that forms a striking counterpart to Durer's famous woodcut of a rhinoceros. Like The Rhinoceros (1515), the body of this majestic animal is divided into large, patterned sections that give the impression of chain mail or armour. It, too, has its horned head lowered, though less in a gesture of brute strength than of graceful submission to the bird pulling a tick from its neck. And whereas Durer's beast seems hypnotised by its own weight, by the inexorable pull of gravity, this 3,500-year-old bull seems to dance with a supernatural lightness. For all this, it's the rhino that is closest in spirit to the post-Renaissance mind, to a universe governed by the certainties of physical laws. While the creatures on the Mycenaean pots mingle with signs representing celestial bodies, the rhino gazes glumly towards a pebble. Star has become stone.
But as "Albrecht Durer and His Legacy" makes clear, this is by no means Durer's sole claim to modernity. More generally, he was the first artist fully to exploit the technique of engraving and the opportunities it gave for limitless reproduction. Where once an artist had to labour over an image that might be seen by only a handful of people, he could now lay down a template that would allow a multitude of perfect likenesses to take flight. The creator and the Creator were drawing closer. Using the markets opened up by the recent invention of the printing press, Durer made sure that his engravings were being pored over the length and breadth of Europe. Every image was authenticated by his AD monogram, which has some claim to be one of the first logos in the modern sense of the word. But whereas the logo as denounced by Naomi Klein sublimates something of little or no intrinsic value, Durer's productions are themselves sublime. People wanted them for their precise beauty, for their hallucinatory detailing, for the brilliance they gave to the old stories and myths. Above all, artisans wanted to copy them, to incorporate them into their own designs. Each official likeness sparked scores of lesser ones.
Of all Durer's works, perhaps none have been so praised, written about and argued over as the three so-called "master engravings". In Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), we see the eponymous knight riding stoically through a landscape that bristles with menace. And that's just the vegetation. Beside him is Death, delivering a wheedling sermon from a partially rotted face. Directly behind him, like a monster from a childhood nightmare, stands the most comically repellent Devil that Durer's imagination could muster.
But the knight doesn't flinch, as though his Christian faith could save him from the uncanny and all its demons. The other two, St Jerome in his Study and Melancholia (both 1514), appear to speak of the blessings and limitations of scholarship. In the former, the saint bends his enlightened head over his desk. His humble studiousness seems to bring a calm clarity to all things, from the light streaming through the windows to the knots in the wooden ceiling. The angelic figure in Melancholia, on the other hand, slumps amid a clutter of measuring instruments while a star explodes gloriously over the sea. The ancient Egyptians said that exact calculation is "the gateway leading to all things", but here it has only alienated. Perhaps our angel should pay less attention to science and more to his wings.
Yet the essence of Durer's prints is not to be found in philosophical interpretations, however convincing they may sound. As with all art possessed of vision, their true meaning lies not in stories told or morals prescribed but in an imaginative transfiguration of the world. And when you really begin to look at these engravings, you realise what an extraordinary transformation it is. Reality has been recast in black and white, rendered with an unearthly lucidity. Stare at them for a while and their real subject comes to seem not so much the things or events depicted as the lines that conjure them, the flicker of black electricity over a snow-white void. Durer shows us the world as an embodiment of energy, a theatre of dancing forces. Funnily enough, the only other time you get such clarity is on the printed page. Here, though, the ink doesn't trace numbers or letters but the lineaments of rocks, trees and living bodies. The text we read is not human but divine.
"Albrecht Durer and His Legacy" is at the British Museum, London WC2 (020 7323 8000) until 23 March
