From Christ to Coke is the first book to look at all the main types of visual icons. It does so via eleven supreme and mega-famous examples, both historical and contemporary, to see how they arose and how they continue to function. The icons range from Christ and the Mona Lisa to Che Guevara and the Coke bottle. The book culminates in the icons of modern science: the double helix of DNA and Einstein's famous equation E=mc2. It is both historcial and contemprary. It is informative, funny, sad and surprising. It dismisses some famous myths and shows how fact is often stranger than fiction. Every reader is a potential expert in their own right and will be entertained and challenged by the author's vivid accounts of the icons.

Author Biography

Martin Kemp FBA is Emeritus Professor in the History of Art at Trinity College, Oxford University. He has written, broadcast and curated exhibitions on imagery in art and science from the Renaissance to the present day, including The Science of Art. Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (1992), The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (2007), Leonardo, and the prize-winning Leonardo da Vinci. The marvellous works of nature and man (1989 and 2006). His book on the newly discovered Leonardo portrait, La Bella Principessa, written with Pascal Cotte, was published in 2010.