A Workshop of Nuns

This 1725 Workshop of Nuns at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg depicts enclosed religious women engaged in the handicraft production that was a significant economic activity in Italian convents. Convents produced embroidery, lace, confections, and devotional objects for sale, and their workshops provided both income for the community and the disciplined manual labor that monastic rule prescribed as a counterpoint to prayer. Magnasco's treatment of this female monastic subject brings the same expressive attention to convent work that he gave to male hermit subjects, though the domestic interior of a convent workshop required a different compositional approach from his characteristic wild landscapes.

The convent interior is rendered with Magnasco's rapid, sketch-like technique, the nuns' figures animated by the nervous energy that characterizes even his most mundane domestic scenes.