Durable painting

These days, we like our artists mad, bad or dead, but Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), the German son of a Hungarian-born goldsmith, achieved fame and fortune across Renaissance Europe in the course of his lifetime. Ahead of the British Museum's 250th birthday celebrations next year, this ambitious exhibition brings together prints, drawings and watercolours from Sir Hans Sloane's original bequest, as well as significant loans from abroad to champion him as the art world's first international celebrity.

The exhibition begins with a portrait of a serious, wispy-haired child posed in profile, his face cloudy with concentration and the index finger on his right hand raised in a gesture of semi-recognition. This is in fact a self-portrait, the 13-year-old Durer's haunting immortalisation of himself in silverpoint, an unforgiving medium that allows for no possibility of correction. Durer was precociously talented, allegedly picking up the rules of perspective in just 10 days, but what is most telling about this work is its inscription, penned at a later date: 'This I drew myself from a mirror in the year 1484, when I was still a child'.

That single proud statement indicates an innovative awareness of himself as an artist. Stroll around the Renaissance wing of the National Gallery, and you will see the work of portrait artists known solely by the names of their sitters, incorporated into their compositions on small curls of paper or strategically placed letters. Those who invested in Durer's prints were buying into the man himself, and whether it was inscribed on a plaque dangling discretely from the branch of a tree, or tucked among grasses in the foreground, his monogram was vital to his complex tableaux. That upper case 'A' straddling the 'D' of his surname became an internationally recognised symbol, a trademark, if you like.

The gift of a new artistic subject - the self - is one of Durer's lasting legacies, and within years of his death, his likeness was being minted on commemorative coins and reproduced in engravings, many of them based on his own famously Christ-like painting of himself with shoulderlength curls and a glowing countenance, that seems to become meaner with each fresh reworking. The exhibition also features works by artists influenced by Durer and hung beside Durer's teenage self-portrait is a copy by Hans Hoffman; Hoffman based his career on his ability to copy Durer, but his sketch does not bear up to such close proximity with the original. It is an imitation, and as such lacks that essential, compelling spark of creativity.

Although it was printing that gave Durer his artistic independence, of all the influential prints on show here, including 'Melancolia', 'The Rhinoceros', and his terrifying 'Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse', none are as thrilling as his preliminary studies. Durer arranged entire worlds on his copper plates and woodcuts, but the end results remain curiously lifeless by comparison. His fluid drawings in brown ink and thick charcoal describe a man mastering his own visual vocabulary, thinking aloud in pictures.

There is a questing energy and intensity here that rarely survives in the prints. On show for the first time in the UK are Durer's 'Praying Hands', whose disembodied, supplicating clasp has made them into an enduring image of piety, but among the most dramatic works are a pair of charcoal portraits, 'Head Of The Dead Christ' and 'Head Of A Suffering Man', drawn in 1503 and inscribed simply: 'I produced these two countenances when I was ill'.

Durer remains the master of the multiple image, and his works have continued to replicate themselves uncannily, centuries after his death. Consider the fate of his poor Rhino, for instance, in its scalloped armour. It was drawn from a sketch sent to Durer who had never seen a real rhinoceros himself, and yet it appeared as an accurate representation in German textbooks up until 1938. It popped up in China in a scene on the side of a gigantic Delft vase, it was sent to battle with an elephant, and - the final indignity - was served up on a Meissen platter surrounded by flowers and insects.