Nuns making wicker flasks in an interior

This scene of nuns making wicker flasks depicts one of the many practical crafts practiced in Italian convents to generate income and occupy the enclosed religious women. The production of flasks, baskets, and other woven objects provided convents with commercial income from sales to the outside world while fulfilling the monastic principle that manual labor complemented prayer. Magnasco's representation of convent handicraft subjects gives this domestic interior scene a documentary dimension alongside its formal interest, preserving evidence of the economic activities that sustained enclosed female religious communities in early eighteenth-century Italy.

The convent workshop is rendered with Magnasco's rapid, sketch-like brushwork, the nuns' hunched figures and the wicker flasks they produce painted with the nervous energy that characterizes his monastic genre scenes.