In Thomas Rowlandson's satirical account of the hype surrounding the Royal Academy's annual exhibition, early eighteenth-century London society jostled and shoved its way up the steep spiral staircase of Somerset House.

This neo-Palladian complex designed by William Chambers housed the art academy with other royal educational institutions and public offices at the time.

Chambers had designed the stairs to the large exhibition hall on the upper floor as a symbolic stairway to Parnassus;

Rowlandson caricatured them as an opportunity for men to look under the skirt of women.

Hence the cheeky title of the stitch, "Exhibition Stare Case", which plays with the English terms for "stairs" and "stare".

Gina Thomas

Features correspondent based in London.

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The academics and civil servants have long since left these rooms. The Courtauld Institute for Art History and the associated art collection have resided in the north wing since 1989, a too little-noticed gem of London. They have now undergone a thorough renovation in order to bring more clarity into the tangle of rooms, corridors and levels behind the magnificent building envelope, which has been tailored to the needs of nine institutions. It was important to emphasize the connection between science and art, which had been lost from sight since Courtauld was founded in the 1930s due to the spatial separation of the sister organizations.

The architectural office Witherford Watson Mann, which specializes in adapting historical buildings to modern requirements, has undertaken a massive intervention without affecting the essence of the classicist interiors. Floors were lowered, walls broken through and the brick-built cellar vaults hollowed out to gain new space, create connections, incorporate modern systems and level surfaces to facilitate movement through the building complex, which had almost fifty different levels. The interventions will only be fully assessed once the work on the east side of the north wing, delayed by the discovery of a huge medieval cesspool, among other things, has been completed and the institute has returned from exile near King's Cross station.

As if a veil had been lifted

Meanwhile, the gallery invites you to rediscover its collection.

Chandeliers and picture lights attached to the frame, which cast irritating shadows on the works of art, have been removed, as have the chains with which the paintings were attached to the picture strips.

Technical devices were implanted under plaster and decorations such as stucco moldings were removed from the walls where they could distract the eye.

Freed from annoying junk, the now generously hung collection gets air to breathe.

It is not only in front of Botticelli's restored Trinity, which after the designs discovered on the reverse, possibly even drawn by himself, has been framed, as if a veil had been lifted.

Starting with the foundations of the three founding fathers Samuel Courtauld, Arthur Lee and Robert Witt, the gallery has gradually grown through an accumulation of legacies such as the collections of the Victorian artist Thomas Gambier Parry, Count Antoine Seilern, who immigrated from Austria, and the art historian Roger Fry.

One of the advantages of the new presentation is that it integrates the history of the building and the collection into the art-historical overview.

In this way Gambier Parry comes into its own, as does Seilern later in the presentation of his extensive collection of oil sketches by Rubens.

Roger Fry's contribution will be honored in a small room decorated in the style of the Bloomsbury group he sponsored.