Italian nuns produced all kinds of manuscripts, textiles, embroidery or ‘needlepainting’, devotional objects and crafts inside cloister walls, but no comprehensive overview has demonstrated their beauty and diversity as well as the exhibition of nuns’ work Krone und Schleier: Kunst aus Mittelalterlichen Frauenklostern. In his publications on German nuns’ art, Hamburger advanced some fundamental principles that still serve as guideposts for German and Italian nuns’ artwork. He reminds us that historically cloistered art made by and for women has been considered in the realm of folklore studies. He contends that Nonnenarbeiten must be investigated in the context in which the images were drawn and distributed for devotional purposes. This is often difficult both in Germany and Italy because images were usually detached from their original settings. In discussing the nuns’ drawings from Saint Walburg, Eichenstatt, he observes that their art stemmed from idiosyncratic invention, the influence of religious texts or oral sermons, and adaptation from miscellaneous visual sources. In general, nuns’ artwork disregards models from professional scriptoria, contains unconventional elements, combines narrative and diagrammatic modes, and sometimes directly reflects themes of ritual and devotion. Purpose, spiritual content and devotional function have become the primary focal points in the study of nuns’ art. As Hamburger explains, the nuns’ freedom and originality are not simply a curiosity, but indicative of aesthetic response to internal convent visual culture.

Like the nuns’ drawings from Saint Walberg, Vigri's breviary and her Man of Sorrows should be approached in their own conventual culture. The breviary initials are complemented by hundreds of passionate, prayerful rubrics that reinforce the devotional and meditational character. The style of the coloured initials bears only a distant resemblance to Ferrarese, Lombard, or French-style illumination. The breviary saints’ images reveal unusual, if not idiosyncratic, interpretations. Similar to difficulties of approaching Nonnenarbeiten with traditional German art historical methods, the Italian aesthetic critical framework has no place for cloistered women's art. Criteria such as invention, narrative force (istoria), mimetic form, variety and complexity, as articulated by Leon Battista Alberti, Giorgio Vasari and Bartolomeo Facio, were developed for religious, political or historical art in the public sphere and manuscripts produced for churchmen, noblemen and humanists.