Bill Gates owns one Leonardo, a valuable one, the Codex Leicester, a notebook of scientific observations. Evidently, the Art Newspaper reports, he told the Victoria and Albert Museum in London that he’d loan it to them, but only if they’d screen visitors, airport-style, and keep lighting levels on the pages much lower than for the other drawings in the show (or at the same lighting level, but for only one hour a day). [via]

The museum didn’t do it, so the notebook stays in Seattle. You may see it around town with its bodyguard.

Also:

Mr Gates owns no other Leonardo material, although he does have one of the finest collections of American paintings. His acquisitions are reported to include: Andrew Wyeth’s Distant Thunder ($7m in 1996), Winslow Homer’s Lost on the Grand Banks ($36m in 1998), George Bellows’ Polo Crowd ($28m in 1999), William Merritt Chase’s The Nursery ($10m) and Childe Hassam’s The Room of Flowers ($20m).

The Hassam:

The Wyeth: