Navicella (mosaic)

The composition was dominated by the fishing boat with its large sail, which represented a metaphor for the "Ship of the Church", whose "captain" on earth was Saint Peter and his successors as Pope.

Giotto would have produced drawings for specialist mosaic workers to recreate on the wall; whether he had any further involvement as the work was created is unknown.

The arcade across the courtyard and its mosaic were at first unaffected by the protracted and complicated rebuilding of the main basilica, but in the 17th century the mosaic underwent a complicated series of four moves and restorations or remodellings in 1610, 1618, 1629 and 1674/75 which finally took it to its present size, condition and location above the main door inside the portico of the new church.

[21] There are thought to be some patches of original work remaining in the mosaic still in St Peter's, which is now semi-circular with a straight bottom edge to fit into a lunette.

Areas where original work seems to survive are in "the gilded edge of the ship, the sail blown by the wind, various sections of some apostles".

Vasari's description emphasized the varied reactions of the figures in the boat as they saw Peter sinking below the waves, and the patient expression on the face of the fisherman on the shore, who, like Pieter Bruegel's ploughman in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus seems to ignore the dramatic scene on the water in concentrating on his own task.

But, as Svetlana Alpers has shown, these were the terms in which Vasari tended to describe large history paintings he admired, though Alberti's description in De pictura also "treats ...[the work] as a psychological narrative".

According to John White: "The relatively schematic, linear quality of much late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century work is wholly absent.

The two heads are, however, closely related both to the work of Cavallini, whose art still dominated the Roman scene, and to the basic type of physiognomy developed on the walls of the Arena Chapel.

The earliest are a number of drawings attributed to the Florentine artist Parri Spinelli (c. 1387–1453), of which the most detailed is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and others are in Chantilly, Cleveland, Ohio and Bayonne.

And they that were in the boat worshipped him, saying, Of a truth thou art the Son of God.On the evening of January 29, 1380, at the time of Vespers, Saint Catherine of Siena, who had been contemplating the mosaic for some hours, suddenly felt as if "the ship had fallen off and landed on her shoulders" with "unbearable weight".