Gongbi — literally "meticulous brush" — is the oldest and most technically demanding of the major Chinese painting styles, a tradition of exacting fine-line brushwork and brilliant mineral pigmentation that stands at the opposite pole from the spontaneous ink wash aesthetics more familiar to Western audiences, and whose supreme achievements in the depiction of birds, flowers, figures, and court subjects represent some of the most purely accomplished technical painting produced anywhere in the world before the modern era. The style is defined above all by its line — a precise, unwavering contour drawn with a fine-tipped brush loaded with ink, outlining every element of the composition with a control and consistency that demands years of disciplined practice to achieve — within which successive layers of transparent mineral pigment are built up in a process of slow, cumulative color construction, the painter applying thin wash after thin wash of azurite, malachite, cinnabar, lead white, and other ground mineral pigments until the desired depth and luminosity of color is achieved, a process that might require dozens of applications for a single feather or petal. Gongbi was the dominant style of the imperial court painting academies, particularly during the Song dynasty under the patronage of Emperor Huizong — himself a painter of exceptional accomplishment — and the bird-and-flower paintings produced in and around his academy set a standard of observational precision and decorative refinement that subsequent generations of Chinese painters would measure themselves against for centuries, the individual feathers of a bird or the veining of a leaf rendered with a devotional attentiveness that suggests the painter understood close looking as itself a form of moral and spiritual cultivation.