text: **Evolution of royal portraiture**
  
  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. 