Pre-Raphaelites, Tate Britain, Seven magazine review It was in this context in 1848 that three young bucks - John Everett Millais (19), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (20) and William Holman Hunt (21) - launched a movement cleansed of chiaroscuro and the mannered Renaissance artistry of Raphael, harking back to the iconographic purity of the middle ages. A more contemporary influence was the new daguerreotype photograph. Its unfailing clarity matched Pre-Raph champion John Ruskin's call for artists to "reject nothing, select nothing" and paint everything with equal importance. Ophelia is a good example. Contrary to convention, Millais completed his verdant background first - spending five months in situ on a Surrey riverbank - before returning to his London studio to paint the drowned lover (modelled in his chilly bathtub by Rossetti's fiancée, Elizabeth Siddal). It is a suffocating work, without hierarchy or spatial recession: each leaf, frond and petal finished with exquisite botanical detail and given as much prominence as Ophelia herself. Drawing heavily for subject matter on Dante, Malory and other medieval tales, it's common to pigeonhole Pre-Raph art simply as escapism from the travails of Victorian living. Occasionally, though, it offered hard-hitting social chronicle: Henry Wallis's exhausted, exploited Stonebreaker, say. The movement's many biblical scenes, in turn, were reflective of the complex religious reality of the mid 19th century. The established Anglican Church was growing unsettled by factions from within (Evangelical, Tractarian, Broad) as well as by a resurgent Catholicism from without - with particular issue over the material paraphernalia of worship. It was amid these debates that the Pre-Raphaelites set out to revive a Christian art tradition that had been wiped out in Britain in the Reformation. Often their approach was typological, with symbol-laden works like Rosetti's Girlhood of Virgin Mary (complete with lily, vine, dove, lamp etc) intended to ensure spiritual meaning be decoded bit by bit, rather than revealed in one fell High-Renaissance swoop. The group's religious imagery was suspected, initially, of disclosing covert Catholic messages. Yet, Pre-Raphaelite belief varied greatly. Rossetti was agnostic; Ford Madox Brown was a Christian Socialist who - as revealed in Work, his novelistic masterpiece of navvies digging up a busy Hampstead street - shared Thomas Carlyle's views on the nobility of labour. Holman Hunt was the most recognisably Christian. His modern parable The Awakening Conscience - of a fallen woman rising from her lover's lap, startled by a ray of light outside - suggests the redemptive light of Christ as salvation for contemporary sinners. In a creditable, if slightly voguish, move, the curators are keen to stress the importance of female artists in the Pre-Raph circle; but, in truth, this importance is exaggerated. The excellent Julia Margaret Cameron's photographs apart, most works were dabblings by sisters or mistresses and add little to our understanding of the movement. The Pre-Raph attitude to women was more Pygmalion than progressive: with a fondness for grooming working-class girls as models, lovers and, if they were really lucky, wives. Always a loose-knit movement, it's hard to say exactly when Pre-Raphaelitism ended; but certainly by the 1860s Rossetti was painting luscious oils of florid, full-lipped "stunners" close-up, recalling Venetian Renaissance imagery of a similar sort. Beauty came to be valued over truth. Edward Burne-Jones would proceed in an even more decorative direction, painting cod-mythological scenes with no clear narrative or moral message: works like The Golden Stairs, all mood and little meaning, heralded Symbolism. William Morris offers an alternative, more salutary ending to the Pre-Raph story, maintaining as he did much of the group's early idealism. Lamenting the cheap, mass-produced goods of 19th-century manufacturing, he revived old-school skills, like weaving tapestry and block-printing wallpaper, at his applied arts company The Firm. Chairs, cabinets and stained-glass panels all feature here: the implication that, out of Pre-Raphaelitism, the Arts and Crafts movement was born. This show will have you looking at Pre-Raph art with new eyes. Albeit not ones, sadly, that make the pictures look any better. 'Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde', to Jan 13; www.tate.org.uk This article also appears in SEVEN magazine, free with the Sunday Telegraph.