The riot Carrà remembered, and misdated
We know what Carrà saw in that crowd because, late in his life, he wrote it down. In his 1945 autobiography, La mia vita(“My Life”), the painter looked back on the day of Galli’s funeral and described being swept into the heart of the riot:
“I found myself unwillingly in the centre of it, before me I saw the coffin, covered in red carnations, sway dangerously on the shoulders of the pallbearers; I saw horses go mad, sticks and lances clash, it seemed to me that the corpse could have fallen to the ground at any moment and the horses would have trampled it.”
You can read the painting straight off that paragraph. The red carnations are the red coffin. The horses gone mad are the rearing clash. The sticks and lances are the black diagonals overhead. The terror that the body might pitch off its bearers and under the hooves is the whole vertiginous, off-balance feel of the canvas, the sense that the coffin up there is one shove from falling. He went home, he tells us, and made a drawing immediately.
It is a memoir, though, not a notebook. It is not a reporter’s account written in 1906; it is a memory of the riot set down in 1945, some thirty-nine years after the fact, by the same man who had turned that memory into a famous painting in between. It is vivid and it is his, and it is the documented source the picture comes from, but it is recollection, not transcript. Read it as Carrà telling you, decades later, what the day felt like to him, which is, conveniently, also what the painting is for.
And memory, as memory does, slipped. In the very same memoir, Carrà attributes Galli’s death to the general strike of 1904, not the 1906 one in which it actually happened. The error is documented; Corriere della Sera, the Milan newspaper, was first to flag the slip. Some have since suggested that Carrà conflated the killing with the larger, more famous 1904 general strike (a bigger, nationwide walkout) in order to hitch his picture to a more historic moment; but that is a guess at his motive, not an established fact, and the simpler explanation, that a man in his sixties misremembered a date from his twenties, will do fine. Either way, the picture itself is not in question. It is the funeral of Angelo Galli, killed on 10 May 1906 and buried three days later. The painter got the year wrong in print; the painting got the day right.