Who is the woman portrayed atop a pillar at UCT's Upper Campus?

Question

On top of a pillar that was about two or three storeys tall, I once saw this sculpture of a woman looking out toward the woods of Devil's Peak on Table Mountain in the City of Cape Town. This being nearly a decade ago, I'm somewhat fuzzy on the particulars, but I think the pillar was somewhere behind the Chancellor Oppenheimer Library at a spot close to Madiba Circle. Whatever the exact coordinates are, this is (or was) on the Upper Campus grounds of the University of Cape Town.

As with a sculpture group on 100 Broadway, New York, NY, in another Question, I was inclined to expect that this is one of the nine Muses from Greek mythology. The style is not Classical Greek like with the sculptures in New York, but certain elements seem to allude to Ancient Greek statuary, in particular how the woman appears to be a caryatid who has separated from a colonnade whose only remaining portion currently is the column on which she stands and, on her head, the edge of roof that she might once have supported.

The Buffalo Architecture and History website interprets these caryatids (above), sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and appearing at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY, as four of the Muses. The solitary stylite-like figure on UCT's Upper Campus is carrying a tablet (or something similar to one) in each hand, the one in her right looking somewhat like a little house. The second-leftmost of Saint-Gaudens' art gallery Muses is holding up a column capital in her right hand, and she is entitled Architecture.

The claim is widespread online, with no clear source that I could trace, that Thaleia, the Muse of comedy and bucolic poetry, is somehow also responsible for architecture, among a few other sciences. Maybe both Saint-Gaudens' Architecture, and the Upper Campus pillar-top, are Thaleia.

One reason not to expect the Upper Campus sculpture to be a Muse is that none of these nine sisters seems to ever appear holding two objects, one in either hand, quite so symmetrically, but of course an artist may well take license by changing up such aspects of representation. The point, nonetheless, is that this makes it that much more difficult to identify the figure along the aforementioned lines, in the absence of further detail on the sculpture.

I'm also fascinated by the chameleon poised at the very top of the statue, hanging out on the piece of roof with which the woman is crowned. Then there's an even bigger chameleon making its way up the pillar towards the woman. What's up with them? Maybe the sculpture is not trying to reference Greco-Roman myth and, with this being in South Africa, perhaps is rather inspired by local legend and folklore. I'd be even more stumped as to her identity if that's the case.

My next best guess would be to assume that she's merely some sort of allegory, as there often tend to be in buildings of government institutions and other organisations, especially Western or Westernised ones. Maybe the woman is a personification of the City of Cape Town, or of the university.

The design style looks a touch like Lawrence Tenney Stevens' 1936 sculpture personifying the flag of Texas under Spanish rule, in Dallas's Fair Park.

This lady undoubtedly is holding up a miniature building. I have no idea how old the Upper Campus art-piece is, nor who the artist is. (I did look up whether Stevens might have done any work in South Africa but, from what I could see, he never went there.)

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Sidenote

_{The subject of statuary on UCT's Upper Campus has been a matter of fiery controversy since 2015, when a decades-long series of student protests aimed at the removal of a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes reached its crescendo. This 1934 statue sat surveying Middle and Lower Campuses, and the city beyond, from its perch at the foot of a large flight of stairs leading in the direction of the library and the pillar lady that I'm asking about.}

_{All my current/recent searches involving statues or sculptures in connection with Upper Campus specifically, or UCT in general, invariably led to this topic. I do not think the pillar lady has any connection to the Rhodes monument or any of the furor surrounding that, except in terms of them both being sculptures planted on the same premises. (I might be wrong about that too, though.)}

Answer 1

The statue is Alma Mater (1996) by Bruce Arnott. It stands, not on the Upper Campus, but outside the Faculty of Law on the Middle Campus: see Google Street View here. Arnott wrote:

My large bronze Alma Mater (or Caryatid figure) was commissioned by the University of Cape Town, and installed in 1996. The sculpture is 2.88 meters high, mounted on a column 6.4 meters high, and located outside the Kramer building on the Middle Campus. The fact that the sculpture was made for the Faculty of Education and now guards the Faculty of Law is only mildly confusing.

This work alludes to the caryatid figures that support the entablature of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens. Originally an Ionic temple (built between 421 and 405 BC), the Erechtheion became a church in the 7th century, and was occupied by the harem of the Turkish commandant during the Ottoman occupation in the 15th century. The caryatid porch is itself probably a reference to the Archaic period, when female figures had been used as columns in Delphi. This architectural conceit points to the interdependence of systems, and historic continuity—the contemporary concern of the Alma Mater sculpture.

The formal language of the bronze caryatid is one in which a volumetric geometry replaces the linearity of the marble caryatids. The sculptural mood of Alma Mater (as suggested also by the fragment of entablature) reflects Doric sobriety rather than Ionic elegance. However, rhetoric is strategically destabilised by the inclusion in the composition of two chameleons that “provide a counter drama to the stasis and solemnity of the figure”. One chameleon is perched on the apex of the sculpture, the other moves up the column, tying this supporting element to the whole. These details challenge the ruling order of the composition―and allude to change.

_{Bruce Arnott (2011). ‘Shaping Ideas: the Visual Forming of Meaning’. African Yearbook of Rhetoric 2:2, pages 163–164.}

Answer 2

^{To complement/supplement Gareth Rees' Answer, with information I stumbled upon around the same time:}

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About the Particular Sculpture in Cape Town

Down along l'Avenue du Président Wilson in Paris I notice, on the monumental gate of the Palais de Tokyo, sculpture-work by Adalbert-Georges Szabo and André Bizette-Lindet which reminds me of the UCT statue, and whose style I've seen described as art deco.

_{Own Photo, August 15, 2024}

Googling this term together with "University of Cape Town" then brings me {dramatically faster than in previous research attempts!} to the institution's Ibali Digital Collections UCT website, which has an article on the piece, acquired in 1996 as the commissioned work of Bruce Murray Arnott, a South African artist who also worked as an academic at the same university's Michaelis School of Fine Art.

Entitled Alma Mater, the statue is a bronze sculpture, which Ibali measures at "3m x 28", saying the following under "Label Information" (with my own emphasis) >>

The caryatid figure forms the basis of this sculpture which refers to classical Greece and the use of a female figure to serve as a column to support an entablature. The caryatid is not confined exclusively to the West. Here the caryatid embodies the combined roles of authority and responsibility. The title "Alma Mater" refers to the nurturing tradition of the University visible in the emblems of learning held out symbolically. The chameleons represent historical process and transformation.

Arnott's own website seems to entitle the piece as Alma Mater (Caryatid), describing its height as "2630mm", and also contains an image of a maquette of the statue.

While the Caryatid is indeed looking out in the direction of Devil's Peak, she is considered to be part of the Wilfred and Jules Kramer Law Building, which (as touched upon by Gareth Rees' Answer) is located not on Upper Campus, but rather about a 5-minute walk down from there, past the Rugby Fields and across Rhodes Drive, at the top of Middle Campus.

_{GoogleMaps StreetView snapshot [taken January 13, 2025] of Alma Mater, with Masingene Building to image right; Kramer Building to image left}

Cross Campus Road, which runs just in front of the Alma Mater Caryatid, would have been the first Middle Campus street directly in front of the view of the Cecil Rhodes statue (mentioned in the Question) as it faced downhill towards the city.

Regarding the Concept

Indeed, as it turns out, Arnott's sculpture is in fact the personification of the University of Cape Town, its title being a reference to the Latin expression defined as follows by The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (p. 24, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000, ed. Elizabeth Knowles) >>

the university, school, or college that one once attended. The phrase is recorded from the mid 17th century, in the general sense ‘someone or something providing nourishment’; in Latin, literally ‘bounteous mother’, a title given to various Roman goddesses, notably Ceres and Cybele.

According to Wikipedia:

By the early 17th century, the nursing mother became an allegory for universities... Several university campuses in North America have artistic representations of alma mater, depicted as a robed woman wearing a laurel wreath crown.

For his art-piece, therefore, Arnott seems to be following a tradition well established (at least across the Atlantic) by the time of his own flourishing, since we can take note of such female depictions of:

• the University of Columbia in New York City (1903), by Daniel Chester French

• the University of Havana (1919), by Mario Korbel

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1929), by Lorado Taft

Wikipedia goes on to say that:

The earliest documented use of the term to refer to a university is in 1600, when the University of Cambridge printer, John Legate, began using an emblem for the university press... The first-known appearance of the device is on the title-page of a book by William Perkins, A Golden Chain, where the Latin phrase Alma Mater Cantabrigia ("nourishing mother Cambridge") is inscribed on a pedestal bearing a lactating woman wearing a mural crown.

Arnott also breaks away from the tradition that seems to have inspired him. By making his Alma Mater into a caryatid, and a free-standing one at that, she takes on the appearance of having broken away from the building of which she had been a pillar, tearing off the edge of its Doric order entablature (the roof superstructure piece on her head) in order to transform it into a crown. In this way she comes to resemble Legate's older mural-crowned alma mater more than the 20th-century wreath-crowned personifications of the American institutions.

Of mural crowns, Wikipedia says that they:

became an ancient Roman military decoration... intended to resemble a battlement, bestowed upon the soldier who first climbed the wall of a besieged city or fortress to successfully place the standard (flag) of the attacking army upon it.

I'm not sure that Arnott would have seen the two chameleons clambering up his Caryatid sculpture as a cheeky riff on this concept, but there is a combination of some traditionally opposing ideas brought into fusion here, as he himself admits [see the quote of his essay referenced by Gareth], and as observed by Kim Gurney in the 2018 ArtThrob article "In Memory of Bruce Arnott 1938-2018", which opines that, "The playful chameleon is everything."