We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
A dove carved on a monument, often in flight or with an olive branch.
Also known as: Bird on a grave, Dove with olive branch, Holy Spirit dove
A dove. In a Christian memorial context it carries the Holy Spirit and the departing soul; with an olive sprig it carries the Genesis flood story and, quite separately, the modern secular peace movement.
On monuments also read as the soul of the deceased departing, particularly where the bird is shown in flight or rising.
Contexts: History
Carrying an olive sprig, refers to the dove returning to Noah's ark in Genesis, and by that route became a general emblem of peace.
The modern secular peace dove, popularised through Picasso's 1949 lithograph for the World Peace Congress, is a distinct twentieth-century usage that draws on the same image without the religious content.
From 1949 · Contexts: Political movements
A plump bird with a short beak and a fanned tail, shown in profile with wings either folded or spread, sometimes with a leafy sprig in its beak.