SHIP. - In early Christian art the ship represents the Church (v.), of which the pilot is Christ Himself and the rowers 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 cited there may be added the expression of St Augustine: “Naviculam istam Ecclesiam cogitate turbulentum mare hoc saeculum.”
The ship may also figure 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 valemus” (PL 38, 475). Thus the ship will be found with the dove, symbol of the soul; the ship under way guided by Christ, represented above by the monogram X as in the epitaph of a Severus; the ship making for port with its lighthouse to indicate the place of salvation. For the boat of Jonah (v.). At other times the ship depicted signifies the civil profession of the deceased, as in the mosaic tomb of a Felix navicularius, discovered at Tabarca (R. Cagnat de La Blanchère, Tombes en mosaïques de Thabraca, in Bibl. d'arch. africaine, I [1897], p. 20, pl. 2, no. 11), and the fresco in the cemetery of Ponziano in Rome representing a boat laden with amphorae (Wilpert, Pitture, pl. 173). The ship is also portrayed as a signum or nickname of the deceased, as in the case of an inscription found in a cemetery on the Via Montanara (Maius or S. Agnese), where the deceased woman was called Nabira and was therefore depicted with a boat as her signum Nabe (E. Diehl, Inscr. lat. christ. veteres, Berlin 1927, p. 4475).