On balance, it is a strange place to mourn Nelson Mandela, but in a country marked by so many unresolved contradictions, Nelson Mandela Square, a privately owned public piazza in the upmarket business suburb of Sandton, is both a fitting and an unavoidable choice of venue.
One of 150 public memorial areas hastily designated nationally to cater for the massive outpouring of grief, solidarity and respect in the wake of Mandela's death, the square is known for its landmark 6m-high bronze likeness of the boy from Mvezo in the Eastern Cape who became a statesman. At its unveiling in April 2004, television celebrity and businesswoman Basetsana Kumalo described the sculpture that dominates the square as "a very happy statue". It is hard to contest this interpretation, given the display of emotion enacted in front of the work in recent days.
Similar scenes of wreath-laying and prayer have also played out in front of sculptures depicting Mandela on Parliament Square in central London and Nobel Square at Cape Town's V&A Waterfront.
The squat figure of Mandela in Cape Town is the work of Claudette Schreuders, an artist whose intimate, family-focused art was indelibly shaped by the early days after apartheid. She is married to Anton Kannemeyer, the scabrous comic-book satirist and co-founder, with Conrad Botes, of Bitterkomix. For all their obsessions with genitalia and Afrikaner guilt, it was Botes who in 1995 produced an illustration of a flying Mandela in a superhero costume with the word "Madibaman" emblazoned above him.
There is nothing insidious about any of this: some of Russia's finest creative accomplishments are those of artists who, in 1917, allied their creative enterprise with the revolution. What came after was unknowable.
Of the more interpretive artworks to engage Mandela, Lisa Brice's Prisoner No. 466/64, exhibited on Robben Island in 1997, is a thoughtful, if not necessarily visually exciting, meditation on Mandela's incomplete visual identity. In an attempt to reconstruct Mandela's lost identity from his prison years, Brice asked police forensics experts to create an image of Mandela in prison using photographs of him before and after his confinement. The reconstructions that resulted were inconclusive, something the artist tendered as a comment on the quest itself.
The visual hole presented by Mandela's missing years in prison has, to some extent, been plugged by the activities of the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory, an organisation established to honour and document the statesman's life. In 2005 it hosted an exhibition that included rare prison photographs. An image showing Mandela in horn-rimmed sunglasses and a hat caught the public imagination; it was quickly pirated and turned into a T-shirt emblem.
Mandela's passage from liberation hero to icon is not unusual; it has precedents elsewhere. Nor is the process whereby his self-image has become abstracted from his life story exceptional.
"Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation," cynically asserted the Marxist intellectual Guy Debord in 1967, long before the advent of Google and its offering of 2.8-million search results responding to Mandela's name.
Despite the surfeit of contradictory images we now associate with his name, what remains truly extraordinary is Nelson Mandela's durability as a visual icon. The assaults of pernickety censors, ropey artists and avaricious businesspeople may have tarnished its value somewhat, but ultimately, the munificence and light Mandela embodies, as a person who lived, continues to prosper, undiminished.