NAVE. — In ancient Christian art, Church (v.), whose pilot is Christ himself and whose rowers at the oars are the Evangelists, as shown by the fragment of a sarcophagus discovered at Spoleto, now in the Lateran Christian Museum (v. CHIESA, in Enc. Catt., III, pl. 90). To the texts mentioned there one may add St. Augustine’s expression: Naviculam titam Ecclesiam cogitate turbulentum mare hoc saeculum.
The ship may also symbolize human life, according to St. Augustine’s expression: «opus est ut in navi simus, hoc est, ut in ligno portemur, ut mare hoc transire valeamus» (PL 38, 475). Thus one finds the ship with the dove, symbol of the soul; the ship on its voyage, guided by Christ, represented above by the monogram ☼, as in the epitaph of a Severus; the ship on its voyage toward the harbor, with its lighthouse indicating the place of salvation. Jonah (v.). At other times, the ship represented signifies the deceased’s civil profession, as in the funerary mosaic of a Pelix novicolarius, discovered at Tabarca (R. Condray de La Blanchère, Tombes en mosaïques de Thabraca, in Bibl. d’arch. africaine, 1 [1897], p. 20, pl. 2, no. 11), and in the fresco of the cemetery of Ponzianus in Rome depicting a vessel loaded with amphorae (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 173). The ship also appears as the signum or nickname of the deceased man or woman, as in the case of an inscription found in a cemetery on the Via Nomentana (Maius or S. Agnese), in which the deceased woman was named Nabira; consequently, a boat was represented as the signum Nabe (E. Diehl, Inscr. lat. christ. veteres, Berlin 1927, p. 4475).