The Brotherhood "lasted only five years, but its style was absorbed by late nineteenth-century art and design across the continent. Inspired by Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelists sought to recover medieval simplicity and purity lost in the pagan luxery of High Renaissance art, typified, they oddly felt, by Raphael. Unlike their Decadent descendants, they professed collective social values." (Camille Paglia)

"Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism, the second branch or form of the movement, grew out of the first in the late 1850s. Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) emphasized themes of medievalized eroticism (or eroticized medievalism) and pictorial techniques that produced a moody, often penumbral atmosphere". (George P. Landow, Professor of English and Art History, Brown University)

A wonderfull intellectually-entertaining treatise is given by Camille Paglia On Pre-Raphaelite Art  (it should be noted, for those that don't know her, this is a very opininated article from a very bright and sometimes controversial thinker)