"The Struggle for the Beautiful" – Palace of Fine Arts, Marina District, San Francisco, California

Around the entablature of the Palace’s octagonal rotunda are three allegorical panels in low relief made by the sculptor Bruno Louis Zimm. Together they represent the "The Struggle for the Beautiful" and each of them is once repeated along the entire circumference of the rotunda’s dome. Two of these panels appear in this photograph.

The panel on the left-hand side depicts "The Triumph of Apollo." It shows the fiery god of Inspiration, Music and the Sun in a procession of his devotees bearing garlands. Apollo’s flaming wings are the rays of the sun. The panel on the right-hand side of the photograph depicts the unending struggle with the gross and stupid, both objective and subjective, that confronts the champion of the beautiful. Art, depicted as a beautiful woman, stands tands serene, aloof, unassailable in the center of the fray. To either side of her the idealists struggle to hold back the materialists, here conceived as centaurs, who would trample upon art. Between the panels are repeated alternately male and female figures, symbolizing those who battle for the arts.