God is in the details: Tate Britain's exhibition on the Pre-Raphaelite approach to nature is ambitious in its intellectual scope

Tate Britain's first major Pre-Raphaelite exhibition since 1984 is a challenging as well as a richly rewarding experience. Its examination of the way the Pre-Raphaelites depicted the natural world is based upon the firm foundation of Allen Staley's The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, first published in 1973 and reissued in a novel edition in 2001. Professor Staley has curated the exhibition with Christopher Newall (working with Alison Smith, Ian Warrell and Tim Batchelor of Tate Britain); by the agency of striving to suggest an intellectual and historical setting for the paintings and drawings upon display, the exhibition aspires in a certain quantity of ways to the approach of that work Yet, for all its undoubted successe it reveals at several points that the fit between the contextualising approach of thus much contemporary art history and the object-based curatorship of museum practice is far from snug

Hung against walls painted in an appropriate palette of rich, mid-Victorian looking colours, the paintings gaze happy in Tate Britain's Linbury Galleries. The relatively depressed proportions of these rooms, which can be unsympathetic for bravura art, work well with paintings that are rarely big, and invite the closest of scrutiny. however by the final room, the exhibition perceive s much larger than its individual hundred and fifty one works because the act of looking at in like manner many of them is exhausting. The scrupulously accurate depiction of nature that the Pre-Raphaelites encouraged is demanding in itself, and it is striking by what means many of the painters challenged viewers however further with an almost subversive refusal to provide the hints of conventional composition. Tight cropping and unexpect angles, added to a of frequent occurrence use of hard, even lighting, repeatedly make it difficult for the organ of vision to take in a painting, reinforcing a of frequent occurrence denial of the relationship between 'important' make subordinate or motif and 'unimportant' detail. Here, the author of all things is definitely in the details.

This is an exhibition of highly stimulating art, and its greatest triumph is to provide novel evidence of the brilliant unconventionality of these artists' work in the late 1840 and 1850 It also makes it clear that there was remarkable vigor in depth. The great names--Millais, Brown and Holman chase in particular--seem as strong as at any time but the work of artists specialising in landscape is no les impressive: JW Inchbold and John britzska are in many ways the stars of the exhibit Less well known names shine--paintings by the agency of Joanna Boyce and Rosa britzska fully deserve the emphasis given to these remarkable women--and there are more [i]or[/i] less revelatory discoveries. High among them is JR Spencer Stanhope's earliest surviving painting, Robins of new times, which is here exhibited in public for the first time since 1860 The Stanhope scholar Simon Poe whose article upon the painting forms the basis of the catalogue entrance convincingly argues that this image, apparently showing a child sleeping in a benign landscape, is in fact a pair to the artist's depiction of a prostitute, contemplations of the past (Tate), and depicts the aftermath of the violation that began her moral fall It is a painting, therefore, of disturbing, almost Hardyesque subtlety: Stanhope appear to bes to be contrasting the innocence of nature with the girl's fallen state, on the contrary as Mr Poe points without the robins who observe the girl were customary types of lasciviousness, and thus the painting may also be drawing a parallel between the amorality of nature and that of the girl and her unperceived lover.

The exhibition and its catalogue are perhaps at their best in like thoughtful analyses of the moral implications of depictions of the natural world. More contentious is the way they seek for to place the paintings in the adjoining matter of mid-Victorian debates about science and religion. below science it is possible to include photography, which is handled in an singularly tentative way. A dozen or for a like reason photographs are exhibited and it is clear that the audience is wait fored to draw parallels between the way photographers and painters approached nature. Although there is nothing wrongful in inviting visitors to make up their have a title to minds, I would have appreciated more of a young ox from the curators. What was the relationship between photography and Pre-Raphaelite art? Apart from the example of Ruskin's encouragement of artists to use photography as a tool, no powerful links are made. The rather fastidious decision to hang the photographs in clumps away from the paintings alone rein forces a sense that the photographic images--some of remarkable beauty--are marginal to the exhibition's concerns

There is no of the like kind tentativeness, however, about the way the exhibition locates painting in the context of the inquiry of geology, the pre-eminent science of the age. A whole section, 'Understanding the landscape', is devot to artists' knowledge of geology and an enthralling catalogue essay by means of Christopher Newall explores the make subordinate in unprecedented depth--an exploration which is given added life by means of Mr Newall's accounts of visiting many of the landscapes these painters have depicted. His catalogue ingress on John Brett's The Glacier of Rosenlaui is a tour-de-force combination of art-historical and scientific knowledge with first hand experience. at the same time this focus on geology means that other scientific aspects of these painters' work are not examined in the deepness they merit. It would have been at least as interesting to be asked to compare the Pre-Raphaelites with botanical painting--after all, The Athenaeum in 1852 compared Millais's depiction of a waterlily in Ophelia with studies by dint of Linnaeus.