Art review: Cut and Paste - 400 Years of Collage, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

We are usually told the art of collage began in Paris in 1912 when Georges Braque stuck a bit of woodgrain paper onto a painting. The timeline in the catalogue for the exhibition Cut and Paste: Four Hundred Years of Collage, however, does not begin in 1912, nor even 400 years ago as the title suggests, but in c.105 AD, the approximate date of the invention of paper in China. It is as though college followed inevitably from that invention. It was more than 1,000 years before paper reached Europe, however and a few more again before, with the advent of printing, it became a familiar material in the west, but thereafter cutting and pasting took off pretty quickly. A 16th-century anatomical illustration of a man has a flap to lift and show his intestines. More daringly, the catalogue illustrates a print from a similar date of a Venetian courtesan whose skirt lifts to show her elaborate underwear and stacked shoes – a pioneering smutty postcard?