The funeral the police would not let through

In the spring of 1906, the city of Milan (the industrial capital of northern Italy, all factories and tram lines and smoke) was in the grip of a general strike. A general strike is what it sounds like: not one trade walking off one job, but workers across a whole city downing tools at once, shutting the place down to force a demand. Milan in 1906 had a large, militant labor movement, and inside it a hard core of anarchists (radicals who wanted to abolish the state and the bosses outright, not bargain with them) and the strike had turned the streets into something closer to a running battle than a negotiation.

One of those anarchists was a young strike organizer named Angelo Galli, born around 1883, so a man of about twenty-three. On 10 May 1906, Galli was stabbed to death by security guards of the Macchi and Pessoni factory as he and a small group of fellow anarchists, among them his comrades Enrico Recalcati and Carlo Gelosa, approached a picket line. He was a real young man on his way to a strike, not a symbol, and that is worth holding before the painting turns him into one. The killing landed in a city already on a knife’s edge. (You will sometimes read that the strike itself had begun after the authorities fired on a crowd, killing one and wounding several more; that specific casualty count traces to a single source, so hold it loosely. What is not in doubt is the temperature of the streets that week, or that a man on the strikers’ side was now dead.)

Three days later, on 13 May 1906, came the funeral, and the funeral is the picture. Hundreds of anarchists turned out to bury Galli, marching behind his coffin, and the authorities sent police on horseback to watch them do it. Then the authorities did something that turned a funeral into a riot: they refused to let the anarchist procession enter the cemetery. A crowd that has come to bury its own and is told it cannot does not quietly disperse. The mourners pushed forward, the mounted police charged, and a violent melee broke out around the coffin itself, in the open street, with the dead man still overhead on his bearers’ shoulders.

And in that crowd, getting shoved and trampled along with everyone else, was a young painter named Carlo Carrà. This matters more than it might sound: in these years Carrà was himself an anarchist, not a sympathetic onlooker but a believer, and on the day Galli was buried he was not an artist observing a subject from a safe distance. He was a man in a brawl, on his own side. That is the difference that makes this painting what it is: the picture is not a scene Carrà witnessed. It is a scene he was inside.