17th-Century Ceiling to Grace School

A 17th-Century carved ceiling that once sheltered Spanish monks and then languished for years in William Randolph Hearst’s estate has found a new home in Santa Paula.

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Workers this week began installing massive beams, each weighing half a ton, to support the 370-year-old ornate ceiling in an expansive new central library being built at Thomas Aquinas College.

The St. Bernardine Library will house 20,000 books, mainly Western civilization’s greatest and most influential works that make up the school’s “Great Books” curriculum, said Thomas Aquinas President Thomas Dillon.

The ceiling will be the centerpiece of the 18,550-square-foot library, set to open next spring, Dillon said. It was donated to the college last year by William P. Clark of Paso Robles, who served as national security adviser and Interior Department secretary during the Reagan Administration.

Dillon predicted that the 220 students will be drawn to the new $2.2-million library as a tranquil place to read and reflect.

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“We are very much concerned with the good, the truth and the beautiful,” Dillon said. “And the ceiling certainly is beautiful.”

Clark bought the Renaissance-style ceiling from the estate of William Randolph Hearst several years ago, said John Holecek, Thomas Aquinas’ director of public information. The 1,200-square-foot ceiling is carved in a recessed-checkerboard pattern and features square panels painted in a stylized floral design overlaid in gilt.

Clark intended to install the ceiling in a community chapel near his ranch outside Paso Robles but ended up using another, more ornate ceiling, Holecek said. Clark decided last year to give the ceiling to the Santa Paula college, partly because his ancestors are Ventura County pioneers, Dillon said.

But he also was attracted by the school’s method of teaching the liberal arts through classic texts discussed in small seminars and tutorials, Dillon said.

Appraisers have placed the ceiling’s worth at nearly $300,000, Holecek said. But some, including Holecek, believe it is priceless because countries increasingly do not allow such treasures to leave their borders.

The college retained Norman Neuerburg, an expert in ancient architecture, to supervise the restoration and installation of the ceiling. Neuerburg discovered through research that the ceiling was carved for a monastery built in the 1620s in Grenada, Spain.

The monastery’s inhabitants belonged to an order called Discazed Mercedarian, which, loosely translated, means Order of the Barefoot Monks of Mercy, Neuerburg said. These monks were charged with rescuing Christians who had been enslaved by pirates roaming the Mediterranean Sea, Neuerburg said.

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After Hearst bought the ceiling in the 1920s, it remained in a leaky warehouse near Hearst Castle, still packed in its original Spanish shipping crates, until this spring, Holecek said. That is when it was hauled to the Thomas Aquinas campus on three 18-wheel flatbed trucks, Holecek said.

As Neuerburg and others unpacked the crates, they discovered two Stars of David carved into the back side of one beam. The stars were probably put there 370 years ago by a Jewish carpenter intent on leaving his mark where it couldn’t be seen, Neuerburg said.

“Of course, this was during the height of the Spanish Inquisition,” he said.

In Santa Paula, Neuerburg worked with Mel Knowles, a wood restoration expert based in Santa Barbara, to restore sections damaged by water, termites and other infestations.

Knowles and some students spent the summer restaining wood and repainting sections where the original paint had faded. Only a few pieces of the ceiling were so damaged they could not be used, Neuerburg said.

Installation of the entire ceiling is expected to take several weeks, Holecek said.

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On Tuesday, a small band of construction workers watched as the first of the 14 giant beams was successfully fitted. Alan von Doeren was one of several carpenters who seemed awed by the prospect of installing a ceiling built during the Middle Ages.

“It’s amazing,” von Doeren said. “All of the carving and craftsmanship was done by hand back then, and they made it all work. Today, we have power drills, electric saws and hydraulic machines to do all the hard work, and we still don’t get it right sometimes.”

And then von Doeren revealed something that closed a 370-year gap.

“See that beam,” he said, pointing to the newly installed column of ancient wood. “I signed my name on it.”