BERLIN -- Local tabloids had a tough call to make over the weekend when the world's richest man and the world's most recognizable lifeguard arrived in the German capital.
Pamela Anderson Lee, in town for a talk-show appearance, may have won the contest of cover stories. But Bill Gates still attracted a respectable 2,000 guests to Saturday's preview of the new exhibit of Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester.
"Since the age of 10, I have thought that Leonardo is the most amazing person in history," Gates told the invitation-only crowd, which included German president Johannes Rau, Berlin mayor Eberhard Diepgen, and Richard Roy, chairman of Microsoft Germany.
Leonardo "was ahead of his time, he thought on his own. He was a genius scientist, and he was an inspired artist and sculptor," Gates said.
The Microsoft boss bought the documents in 1994 for nearly $31 million, and his collection is the only privately owned Leonardo notebook. The codex inherited its name from Thomas Cook, the Earl of Leicester, who bought the manuscript in 1715.
Written in Leonardo's peculiar "mirror writing" -- essentially a backward script -- the codex chronicles the artist's observations from 1506 until 1510.
The themes of Leonardo's text and sketches -- the properties of the moon, the origin of fossils, and the flow of water -- fill 72 unbound pages.
Curators at Berlin's museum der dinge [Museum of Things] paired the Codex Leicester with the schematics of Joseph Beuys. The late German painter's 96 drawings were inspired by the discovery of another Leonardo manuscript -- the Codices Madrid -- in 1965.
"Leonardo and his work preoccupied Beuys," Gates said. "Like Leonardo four centuries earlier, Beuys broke through the traditional barriers between art and science."
Angelika Thiekötter, director of museum der dinge, said Beuys' work offers a connection "between something old and something new."
"Beuys played on the contemporary ideas of art and science. He too showed that art, science, technology, and communication do not have such a big distance [among them]," she said.
While Leonardo is best known for painting the Mona Lisa, the Renaissance artist was also considered one of the great scientists of his age, and was consumed by his explorations of the natural world.
Thiekötter said revisiting Leonardo's 500-year-old ideas is "an opportunity for us to explore new ground in familiar areas. We can rediscover the world around us."
The exhibit, which runs until 19 March, arrived in Berlin after stops in Italy, Lisbon, Seattle, and New York. Laurie Stein, who organized the Berlin show, said, "The security measures were overwhelming. I've never experienced anything like it."
The exhibit is housed in darkened rooms, and Leonardo's notes are kept in dimly lit boxes. In separate areas, vats of water render the Italian artist's technical sketches of waves, whirlpools, and falling water.
Naturally, there are computers: Visitors can browse through the pages of Leonardo's folio and scroll over the text with a simulated mirror that flips the writing over, while translating the pages line by line into German.
Gates said the production should "encourage us to challenge our preconceptions. [Leonardo and Beuys] call on us to abandon the conventional and embrace the new."
Perhaps their spirit inspired the Microsoft founder to appear Saturday night on Bet That, a popular German TV game show.
The program -- which invites celebrities to answer trivia questions correctly or perform mortifying antics in front of a national audience -- reunited Berlin's prevailing tabloid darlings: The sex symbol Lee appeared as a guest along with Gates.
