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.”