Danchenko M. Rococo as phenomenon of Western-European culture of XVII-XVIII century

The dissertational research is dedicated to the study of rococo as a cultural phenomenon, which reflects a transformation of public mentality in Western European countries in the period from 1660s till 1740s. On the background of the data, obtained from the research of the sources about people’s private life in France, Germany and Italy in XVII-XVIII centuries, and informaation collected from the various objects of art and litearture (pictures, works of ornamental art, literary and dramatical compositions) a problem of origin of Rococo culture as intellectual, ideological and stylistic phenomenon was explored. For the first time in Ukrainian cultural studies was made a comparison of specificities of Rococo genesis in a region of continental Europe and thus provided particular interpretation of peculiarities and differences of cultutal product in France, Germany and Italy. Also for the first time was applied a method of interdisciplinary research for the reconstruction of those mental changes, which, according to the author’s opinion, took place first in the minds of oppositional French nobility, and within next forty years were distributed in the educated social circles of French society, and then have not only found their reflection in pictures and pieces of ornamental art, but also were recorded in fictional literature of that period. The very introduction of cultural analysis of the ideas, expressed in juridical documents conserning the hierarchand regulation of intra-familial power, concepts of moral duty and regulation of property commitments into context of cultural-historical research puts at least an innovative methodological slant on the study of this problem.