The GNOME canvas is an engine for structured graphics that offers a rich imaging model, high performance rendering, and a powerful, high-level API. It offers a choice of two rendering back-ends, one based on Xlib for extremely fast display, and another based on Libart, a sophisticated, antialiased, alpha-compositing engine. Applications have a choice between the Xlib imaging model or a superset of the PostScript imaging model, depending on the level of graphic sophistication required.