Landscape painting offered artists the opportunity to create visual poems about the beauty and continuity of nature and man's place in it. Lu Zhi, a 16th-century artist, belonged to a class of highly educated men who painted for their own pleasure. In Distant Mountains, he used multiple ground planes and suggestive voids to create a majestic vista of jagged peaks and a meandering, wide river. Through the crystalline precision of his brush strokes, the artist achieved an image of great clarity and refinement.