NAVE. - In ancient Christian art the ship represents the Church (v.), whose pilot is Christ himself and whose oarsmen are the Evangelists, as shown by the fragment of a sarcophagus discovered at Spoleto, now in the Museo Cristiano Lateranense (v. CHIESA, in Enc. Catt., III, pl. 90). To the texts recalled there one may add the expression of St. Augustine: Naviculam titam Ecclesiam cogitate turbulentum mare hoc saeculum.
The ship can also represent human life, according to the expression of St. Augustine: «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 to indicate the place of salvation. For the boat of Jonah (v.). At other times the ship depicted stands for the civil profession of the deceased, as in the tomb mosaic of a certain 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 the fresco of the cemetery of Ponziano in Rome representing a boat laden with amphorae (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 173). The ship is also found depicted as a signum or nickname of the deceased man or woman, as in the case of an inscription found in a cemetery of the Via Nomentana (Maius or S. Agnese) in which the deceased woman was called Nabira, and therefore as the signum Nabe a boat was represented (E. Diehl, Inscr. lat. christ. veteres, Berlin 1927, p. 4475).
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Enrico Josi