$30.8 Million Gets Gates Closer Look At Da Vinci

SEATTLE - He worked in slightly less-technical mediums - chalk and ink on paper.

But Leonardo da Vinci's innovative 16th century thoughts and ideas were enough to attract a small chunk of the personal fortune of the man who's made his billions working with pixels and bytes.

A Microsoft spokeswoman is calling Bill Gates' $30.8 million purchase of da Vinci's Codex Hammer the simple product of personal interest.

But by buying the 72-page diary of writings on such subjects as astronomy, geology and meteorology, Gates enters the art market at the highest level of anyone in the past four years.

"It's an extraordinary moment in auction history," said Christopher Burge, chairman of Christie's America. The pre-sale estimate for Friday's auction was $10 million to $15 million.

The bidding opened at $5.5 million but jumped to nearly six times that during a 2 1/2-minute bidding war between Gates' representative and one from Milan's Cariplo Foundation, backed by one of Italy's largest banks. The price is the highest ever bid for a manuscript, Burge said.

To those familiar with the nature of da Vinci's writings, the purchase seems natural enough.

"It makes perfect sense" that one of the 20th century's technological leaders would be interested in da Vinci's work, said Professor John Shearman, who teaches fine arts at Harvard University and has worked with the notebooks.

"And I'm sure he can afford it."

In the document, drafted between 1506 and 1510 in Milan and Florence, Italy, da Vinci studies the earth and the cosmos through words and pictures. His explorations range from astronomy to the atmosphere, from physical geography to geology, from hydraulics to canal building.

On one page, he remarks that the light of the moon is reflected sunlight - an observation made a century before Galileo proved that the moon does not shine on its own. Da Vinci correctly explains the presence of marine shells and fossils on mountains and plains far from the sea. He offers advice on flood control, dams and canals. He explores the principles of siphons and steam power. He presents engineering designs for the snorkel and submarine.

He explains why the sky is blue.

"Experience shows us that air must have darkness beyond it and hence it appears blue," da Vinci writes.

All of this is recorded in da Vinci's trademark mirror-image right-to-left left-handed script.

Gates, 39, who was listed this year by Forbes magazine as the country's richest man with assets of $9.2 billion, was not available for comment. But one Microsoft spokeswoman said he was attracted to the notebooks because of their intellectual value.

"Bill's a very inquisitive guy. He's fascinated with Leonardo da Vinci," said Microsoft spokeswoman Mich Mathews.

Professor Shearman said there are roughly 20 such collections of da Vinci's notes in existence. Except for the Codex Hammer, all others are held in museums, mostly in Europe, or by the Queen of England.

The Codex Hammer, which takes its name from its previous owner, California oil tycoon Armand Hammer who bought the notebooks for $5.6 million in 1980, was announced to go for auction three months ago. A curator at the Seattle Art Museum wrote to Gates, suggesting he may want to buy it.

Now, museum officials are hoping that suggestion may bring at least some pages of da Vinci's musings to Seattle.

"We are certainly going to go for it," said Mary Gardner Neill, director of the Seattle Art Museum.

For the time being, at least, Gates intends to share the notebooks for public showings half the time, and also keep them in a private collection. The only plan so far is to display the notebooks in Italy for the next year or two.

There is no immediate plan to show them at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, already home to a large collection of all manner of artwork - sculptures, glass work and paintings.

Information from Associated Press and Los Angeles Times is included in this report.