Learning About Leonardo Billionaire Bill Gates Guides Fifth-Graders Through The Accomplishments Of Da Vinci

A trip to the art museum to learn about Leonardo da Vinci took on new interest for a fifth-grade class when their tour guide was Bill Gates.

The pupils from Seattle’s Dearborn Park Elementary School seemed impressed Monday night when the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. gave them a tour and tutorial of Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, which will be the centerpiece of a Seattle Art Museum exhibit that starts Oct. 23.

Gates owns the 500-year-old scientific document written by the Renaissance master. He paid $30.8 million for it at an auction in 1994.

After giving the children a private showing of the 18-page manuscript, Gates answered questions from the kids for about 15 minutes. Reporters and photographers were invited to watch the question-and-answer period as part of the museum’s efforts to promote the exhibit.

One pupil asked Gates: “Leonardo didn’t finish all of his work and you didn’t finish Harvard or your first computer program. Do you think you are like him?”

Gates deflected the question, talking instead about the breadth of Leonardo’s knowledge and curiosity.

“He had a lot of projects to work on,” Gates said.

The children sat on the floor of the stage inside the museum’s auditorium while Gates and a curator, Chiyo Ishikawa, sat in chairs facing them. An illustration of the codex was projected on the wall behind them.

Interspersed with the questions about Leonardo, which the children prepared in advance, were more off-the-cuff inquiries.

“How many chips in a laptop computer?” one boy asked.

“Quite a few,” Gates replied with a smile. “Between 40 and 50.”

When asked afterward what they liked best about the tour, Gregory Hill didn’t hesitate.

“We got to meet the richest man in America,” he said.

Teacher Janice Hunt said her pupils had been preparing for the visit for a couple of weeks, and that one key was talking early among themselves about Gates’ wealth.

“With that out of the way, we could brainstorm on what to ask him about Leonardo,” she said.

The museum’s show, “Leonardo Lives: The Codex Leicester and Leonardo da Vinci’s Legacy of Art and Science,” will include art by Leonardo’s contemporaries and 20th-century work by artists inspired by Leonardo.

The codex chronicles Leonardo’s observations, insights and experiments into geology, paleontology, human anatomy and other subjects. While he was best known for his art and inventions, some of his scientific observations were far ahead of their time.

The manuscript includes sketches that show the way water flows around obstacles, and suggestions of types of machines that can be powered by falling water. Leonardo also writes about why the sky is blue and how the moon is illuminated.

He never published the work, but experts say it appears he intended to.

In the exhibit, the pages of the codex, which were found loose when it surfaced in 1690, are accompanied by software that provides instant English translations.

The codex got its name in 1715, when it was acquired by Thomas Coke, the Earl of Leicester. It was kept in that family until the 1980s, when it was bought by industrialist Armand Hammer.

Since Gates bought the codex, it has been exhibited in Europe and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It is the only surviving notebook of Leonardo that remains in private hands.