Oscar Wilde – self-styled apostle of aestheticism – announced in 1891 that “They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.” A refulgent communion is invoked, in which (we may infer) semiotics is not merely defeated by art's very being, but lies prostrate and languid in the dust. Even to discuss the V&A's temporary exhibition, The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900, seems a sort of intimate cultural outrage, like noisily unwrapping a toffee during one of Pinter's pauses. Yet there's no getting round the fact that, for many, the exhibition's first, incongruous impression will be the reproductions of Frederic Leighton's Pavonia (1859) which are plastered over London's red buses, a study in peacock feathers and successful publicity. The exhibition's lure lies as much in its surprising disparities as in the beauty so stridently professed by aesthetes like Wilde: it unites heterogeneous elements into a grand curiosity shop of Victorian fine art and (pleasingly cluttered) material culture.

The exhibition treats of the aesthetic movement in all its variegated guises, organising its forty-year period into broadly chronological sub-categories and taking in what seems like everything – from eerie Burne-Jones oils with their tincture of belle-dame-sans-merci to etiolated Beardsleys and a mingle-mangle of Japonaiserie for the aesthete's “House Beautiful”. The paintings, above all, assume a fuller meaning as part of this panoply of faddishness, weirdness – well might it be termed a cult – and middle-class emulation, spiced with increasing satire as the decades passed. There are many familiar images here, including Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 3, and Rossetti's plangently lush Bocca Baciata and Veronica Veronese. Such paintings are often too well known, and the eye slips past their many, unengaging reproductions; in the darkened, theatrically-lit setting of the exhibition space – amongst but not really of their mass-produced counterparts, the postcards, pots, and gentle ephemera of an industrial age – they become newly striking. Whistler's white girls lean more languidly and look, it seems, more deeply into the shadows outside their canvases. Currents of cross-pollination emerge between fine art and more ordinary objects: the ivy-dark velvet gown which dominates Veronica Veronese is echoed by a real example of 1890s “aesthetic dress” in flowing sage-green, reportedly worn by a member of the Liberty family.

De Morgan 1888

Such correspondences and their attendant – often commercial – ironies are by no means new discoveries. In Tom Stoppard's masterly Housman bio-play, The Invention of Love (1997), which deals at some length with aesthetic Oxford, Walter Pater is moved to remark that, “As for arts-and-crafts, it is very well for the people; without it, Liberty's would be at risk, in fact it would be closed.” Whistler, in his “Ten O'Clock Lecture” – an impassioned artistic manifesto from 1885 – deprecated the long reach of aesthetical modes, arguing that ordinary people had been “harassed with Art[...] Their homes have been invaded, their walls covered with paper, their very dress taken to task,” with artists themselves replaced by “the manufacturer and the huckster”. But Stephen Calloway, The Cult of Beauty's curator, has achieved within the exhibition an accomplished balance between the warring forces of sincerity, satire, and commercialism. One indisputable highlight is a Worcester teapot in the shape of that much-lampooned figure, the aesthetic youth. This devastating object sports a jacket of tremulous greenery-yallery and a sunflower affixed to his china breast, while the arrangement of his arms into a handle and a pouring spout has been artfully contrived to suggest the sort of conscious posturing which Gilbert and Sullivan giggled over in Patience, their 1881 satire on Aestheticism:

You hold yourself like this, (attitude)

By hook and crook you try to look both angular and flat (attitude).

On the whole, though, the exhibition's collection of objets is more concerned with re-creating the “House Beautiful” than with poking fun at the movement. Wilde, in his 1882 lecture of the same name – part of the infamous, velvet-suited American tour – claimed that loving beauty could “temper and counteract the sordid materialism of the age,” and expounded detailed design suggestions for aspiring transatlantic aesthetes. The subtle tints that Wilde praises appear in Henry Treffry Dunn's painting of Rossetti in his Cheyne Walk sitting-room, a concerto of stormy blue and gold, but The Cult of Beauty has not been contented with such depictions, also electing to reconstruct Rossetti's bedroom and to include a 360-degree projection of that pre-eminent aesthetic interior, Whistler's “Peacock Room”. The latter was designed for F. R. Leyland in the 1870s, with the enthusiastic artist going well beyond his original brief, and ruining his relationship with his patron in the process. Housed at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D. C., it's an enthralling sight, deluging the senses with a flood of colour and gilded ornament; the projected copy echoes the grandeur of its original, though it cannot hope to match it. Cheyne Walk is also a potent symbol of the age, its associations more sombre. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's home, Tudor House, was the scene of his decline and increasing addiction to chloral, while Virginia Woolf (whose mother had sat for Watts and Burne-Jones) chose the street as a symbol of the old order in her second novel, Night and Day (1919). Opposing Chelsea smugness to the airy modernity of the Bloomsbury squares, Woolf presents a heroine in thrall to the legend of her eminent grandfather, a poet who evidently mingled with the pre-Raphaelite set: Katharine Hilbery curates his memory through the preservation of paintings and objects, much like an early and reluctant ancestor of The Cult of Beauty. Indeed, the present exhibition includes some of the lambent photographs taken by Woolf's great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron – like so many of Cameron's strangely numinous images, they deserve a long, considering look.

Sarony 1880

If aestheticism came to seem cloying to its youthful inheritors at the century's end, they nevertheless benefited from the wholesale attack which some sections of the wider movement launched upon Ruskinian morality in art. In the 1840s, Ruskin had declared his wish to “attach to the artist the responsibility of a preacher,” a view from which the aesthetes diverged with increasing contention and derision. Whistler was an outspoken opponent – perhaps unsurprisingly, since he also perceived Ruskin as a personal antagonist, suing him for libel in the 1870s after the critic attacked his Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket. Although Whistler won the case, he was awarded only one farthing in damages, and subsequently went bankrupt; just a few years later, he was articulating the profoundly anti-Ruskin view that art was “occupied with her own perfection only”, aspiring to no morality other than beauty itself. Tom Stoppard made great use of Ruskin for The Invention of Love, in which he is perhaps the foremost sentimentalist among the great men of Oxford, attempting to stem the aesthetic tide by hounding some morals into a recalcitrant Oscar Wilde. His presence, Stoppard's Ruskin insists, provides disciplined links between beauty, morality, and concrete social good, so that upon his departure for Venice, “Oxford reverted to a cockney watering-place for learning to row.”

The university was by no means a bastion of traditionalism, even before the advent of Wilde: as well as nourishing Pater, author of England's best aesthetic prose, it also witnessed some of the movement's first stirrings in the 1850s, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself a Londoner, began to associate with Morris and Burne-Jones, both undergraduates at Exeter College. All of them contributed to new Arthurian frescoes decorating the Oxford Union – sadly done on such ill-prepared walls that they faded swiftly – and all were to heap their gifts upon aestheticism's various but interlinked altars. One of the models recruited for the Union's murals was Jane Burden, who married William Morris in St Michael at the North Gate, and helped to create the decorative tour de force of Red House before settling into her role as a chief Rossetti muse. The relationship between the decadent excess of “aesthetes proper”, such as Wilde, and the socialistic preoccupations of the arts-and-crafts clan is an uneasy one. These disparate priorities cannot be assimilated within any monolithic notion of aestheticism as a movement with shared aims, but the V&A has done its best to resist such a trap, presenting its wares as transiently and ambiguously related, rather than as moments within a coherent aesthetic scheme.

The Cult of Beauty's fourfold chronological divisions assist in breaking down this torrent of objects into more manageable subgroups: the exhibition feels full, but for the most part avoids unnecessary sprawl. To the modern eye, aesthetic furniture is perhaps the most alien component of the collection, dauntingly ornate, vast, and remote from today's interiors where other aesthetic styles, such as the Morris wallpapers, have survived. Less grandiose exhibits have a fascination of their own: the products of arts-and-crafts bookmaking form a particularly charming display, from typography to gold-blocked covers, and reveal how works by the movement's literary associates could receive the same detailed care that was more obviously lavished on the arts of the home. The aesthetic potential of inter-connected disciplines, the literary and the visual, reaches its zenith in Beardsley's black and white illustrations of Salomé. Wilde's play was debarred from the English stage for depicting biblical figures, and can now hardly be imagined without its accompanying erotic grotesqueries. Beardsley plays with familiar aesthetical motifs – such as the ubiquitous peacocks – and the stripped lines of his illustrations evoke the Japonisme so beloved within the movement; the images are not, however, weighed down by their influences. In The Climax, Salome kneels, arching forward in eagerness or hunger, with the head of John the Baptist clutched in her hands. Wilde's text, integrated within the illustration, proclaims a grisly embrace just over – J'ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan – and the image fully captures the suspended moment that follows. The curves of Salome's upraised locks are not only a visual echo to other compositional curves within the image: they also suggest hair in arrested motion, frozen for an instant before it can fall again into its wonted place. If you know that Wilde's play has the very cosmos itself grow dark for this moment, then the image's mingled intimations of coyness, theatricality, and an abrupt, shocking voyeurism (Beardsley's illustration “lights” the text's darkness) become not only more explicable, but doubly evocative.

Conncanen 1880

Aestheticism has its stations of the Cross – its Grosvenor Gallery, Leighton House, and Liberty – and its much-mocked shibboleths: the lilies and blue china, the attitudinising and Early English everything. Beyond and beneath all this is a deep belief that beauty can be instantiated and reified; it can be painted, sewn, or simply “made”. By virtue of the exhibition's immense success in unpicking and analysing the ramifications of this conviction, it becomes extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for the things which still seem beautiful to the modern eye – and that's certainly not everything – to “mean only beauty”, as Wilde would urge. Need this mar one's plunge into the teeming, fantastically adorned exhibition space, with its waves of peacocks and glowing oils? Eleven decades of Modernism have accrued, so perhaps we plunge cautiously and with a little suspicion in our hearts, but the experience is nevertheless a rich one. The proverb which lies behind Bocca Baciata, giving the work its title, declares that the kissed mouth does not wax stale: the painting, also, has not lost its lustre.

The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900 is at the V&A until July 17.