Fabric exhibition is a cut above

Fabric in painting: not, I think you will agree, a small subject for an exhibition. Nor, on the face of it, a particularly promising one. On the one hand, it's everywhere in art, even in places where it has no business to be (such as Fragonard's erotically nude Young Girl On Her Bed, Making Her Dog Dance). On the other, it's, well, cloth.

So the idea of a show that traces the history of drapery in art may not instantly have your feet tapping their way to the National Gallery. But it should, because Fabric Of Vision pulls back the covers on one of the most ubiquitous elements of painting and shows it to be one of the more interesting.

Appearances to the contrary, cloth isn't cloth isn't cloth. The history of how fabric has been represented in art is as closely bound with the way humanity sees itself as is the portrayal of the bodies it covers; maybe even more so.

Take the Renaissance. Until the late 1300s, drapery hung in stylised folds, bearing no relationship to the flesh beneath it. With the new Renaissance interest in humanism, though, cloth came out of the closet and began to own up to what was going on below, clinging to shoulders and breasts and celebrating their existence.

By van Dyck's Countess Of Castlehaven, painted around 1630, this newly-liberated fabric had taken on a life of its own, no longer so much articulating sitters as enveloping them. By Ingres, it had calmed down again, serving as an erotic frame for elbows and chests.

And so the curious dance of flesh and its coverings has gone on, reaching a climax in this show with the photographic self-portraits of Cindy Sherman. Piero and Cindy, linked by a common art-historical theme: who'd have thunk it?

Wednesday 19 June until Sept 8, Sainsbury Wing, National Gallery , Trafalgar Square WC2, daily 10am to 6pm (Wed to 9pm), £7, £5 concs. Tel: 020 7747 2885. www.nationalgallery.org.uk. Tube: Charing Cross

Exhibition details