AN IVORY statue of St. Thomas Aquinas, gifted by Spanish Dominican friars to Pope Leo XIII, is set to be sold by a Filipino art auction house in Makati on Dec. 6.
The ivory statue will be the centerpiece of Leon Gallery’s Christmas sale at the “Kingly Treasures Auction.”
Sculpted by Espiridion Arevalo, the image of the University’s patron saint was commissioned by the Dominican Province of the Most Holy Rosary of the Philippines, as a gift to Pope Leo XIII for his 50th ordination anniversary as a priest in April 1888.
The statue features the great medieval theologian wearing the Dominican habit, seated on a chair, wearing a robe and holding a feathered quill in his right hand and a scroll in his left, to symbolize his monumental works, notably the Summa Theologiae, wrote Leon Gallery consultant Lisa Guerrero Nakpil in the auction catalogue.
The image is surrounded by four medallions, with the first, reading “Ratio Ad Humanum Fastigium Thomae Pennis Evecta, Jam Pere Nequit Sublimus Assurgere Aetern Patr,” or “Human reasoning borne on the wings of Thomas Aquinas could scarcely rise higher.”
The quote was an excerpt from Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris, which extolled Aquinas’s philosophical and theological system as the basis for all Catholic education.
Another inscription on the ivory carving honors Pope Leo’s proclamation of St. Thomas Aquinas as the patron of all Catholic schools in 1880.
Pope Leo XIII granted the “Pontifical University” title to the University of Santo Tomas on Sept. 17, 1902, formalizing the special relationship between the University and the Holy See.
UST is the second institution in the world to be bestowed this title, after the Jesuit-run Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
The University remains the only pontifical university in the Philippines and Asia. Yuvshenka Andrea R. Osea
