sculpture, theatre, dance, music, and the almanacs that diffused royal propaganda to the population at large.
Over his lifetime, Louis commissioned numerous works of art to portray himself, among them over 300 formal portraits. The
earliest portrayals of Louis already followed the pictorial conventions of the day in depicting the child king as the majestically
royal incarnation of France. This idealisation of the monarch continued in later works, which avoided depictions of the effect of
smallpox that Louis contracted in 1647. In the 1660s, Louis began to be shown as a Roman emperor, the god Apollo, or Alexander
the Great, as can be seen in many works of Charles Le Brun, such as sculpture, paintings, and the decor of major monuments.
Image and depiction
Evolution of royal portraiture