Cairo

Cairo is a 2D graphics library that provides a unified imaging model for screen and printer. It takes advantage of hardware acceleration where available. Currently, the GTK+ GUI uses Cairo as its backend. In addition there is a lot of work being done to create a fully compliant SVG renderer on top of Cairo.

There is a low level Python module that allows applications programmers to use the Cairo canvas to full effect. This is in addition to the GTK+ API which is just a layer over top of Cairo.