Sweeping in a great arc around the western shore of the lagoon, the Palace, in the architect's view, is merely a background for the water, the trees and the plants on the terraced walls and pergolas. Certainly it is a beautiful setting to a beautiful scene. So perfectly are the Palace and its foreground fitted to each other that the structure looks as though it might have stood there for twenty centuries, a well-preserved Roman villa, while generations of trees grew, and decayed, and were reproduced around its base. The great detached colonnade, with its central rotunda, is the climax of the entire structure. It is backed up and given solidity by the walls of the gallery behind it, 1,100 feet long. These walls, unbroken save for the entrances, are relieved and beautified by shrubbery set on a terrace halfway between the ground and the eaves. (p. 113.) At the extremities of the double colonnade, and spaced regularly along it, are groups of four columns, each crowned with a great box designed for flowers and vines. Unfortunately, the architect's plan to place growing plants in these receptacles was vetoed because of the cost. The weeping women at the corners, by Ulric Ellerhusen, expressive of the melancholy felt on leaving a great art collection, were intended to be only half seen through drooping vines. On the water side of the rotunda, a novel effect of inclusion is obtained by semi-circular walls of growing mesembryanthemum. Around the entablature of the noble octagonal rotunda are repeated Bruno Louis Zimm's three panels, representing "The Struggle for the Beautiful." (p. 114.) In one, Art, as a beautiful woman, stands in the center, while on either side the idealists struggle to hold back the materialists, here conceived as centaurs, who would trample upon Art. In another, Bellerophon is about to mount Pegasus. Orpheus walks ahead with his lyre, followed by a lion, representing the brutish beasts over whom music hath power. Back in the procession come Genius, holding aloft the lamp, and another figure bearing in one hand the pine cones of immortality, in the other a carved statue which she holds forward as a lesson in art to the youth before her. In the third panel appears Apollo, god of all the arts, in the midst of a procession of his devotees bearing garlands. Between the panels are repeated alternately male and female figures, symbolizing those who battle for the arts.