“From this point of view, mannerism is the first modern style, the first which is concerned with a cultural problem and which regards the relationship between tradition and innovation as a problem to be solved by rational means. Tradition is here nothing but a bulwark against the all too violently approaching storms of the unfamiliar, an element which is felt to be a principle of life but also of destruction. It is impossible to understand mannerism if one does not grasp the fact that its imitation of classical models is an escape from the threatening chaos, and that the subjective overstraining of its forms is the expression of the fear that form might fail in the struggle with life and art fade into soulless beauty.”
(Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, trans. Stanley Godman, vol. 2, pp. 100–1.)
I haven’t read Hauser’s Social History, but I remember (dimly) at least beginning his book devoted to Mannerism. I was excited by the connections he made between Mannerism and modern art (and literature). It wasn’t the kind of formalist history/criticism I was used to. I’ve found something similar (I guess more exciting for me) in Yves Bonnefoy’s writing about art. Here are a couple of sentences from “Time and Timelessness in Quattrocento Painting” in his collection The Lure and the Truth of Painting.
“…being is to be found in these paintings, if we look for it in the artist’s manner. A sense of being which does not stem from real existence–anxious, troubled, pre-Copernican beneath the humanist self-confidence–where Leonardo will lose his way, Mannerism will find delectation, El Greco will derive new strength…”
“…When it becomes psychological, Florentine art gives assent to a specious kind of knowledge, soon to be enshrined in Mannerism, where only nonbeing glitters.”