The piece depicts the violent funeral of anarchist Angelo Galli, an event Carrà witnessed in his early adulthood.

Critics have noted compositional similarities between The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli and Paolo Uccello's work The Battle of San Romano.

[3] Carrà would incorporate Picasso’s technique of fracturing, or using corresponding and overlapping lines to display conflict, as a means to convey harsh movements.

Carrà was exhibited alongside other Futurist painters, including Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla.

[4] In the center of the canvas, Galli’s coffin is painted draped in red cloth and uneasily balanced whilst being held aloft.

The top third of the piece is dominated by darkly drawn diagonal lines, indicating banners, lances, flagpoles, and cranes, and drawing parallels to weapons of war.

"The piece has been compared to Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s Fourth Estate (Il Quarto Stato) due to its similar subject matter and ability to establish a "direct relationship between the viewer and the painting".

[3] The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli has been noted as "unusual" for Futurist art, owing to its subject, scale, and historical importance.

[3] The art historian and former director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., wrote that “fundamentally, in its main lines and masses Carrà’s Funeral is as classically organized as a fifteenth-century battle piece by Paolo Uccello.”[10] The art historian Dr. Rosalind McKever has also proposed that Funeral is compositionally similar to Uccello's The Battle of San Romano, noting that, "The clash between the anarchists and the police is compositionally closest to the Uffizi version; the dominance of black and red recalls the Louvre version; and the melee of flag poles, lances and cranes jutting into the sky is present in all three."

[3] Author Dr. Mark Antliff has proposed that Carrà's The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, along with other contemporary Futurists, incorporates the philosophical theories of Henri Bergson, in an attempt to "transform the consciousness of the Italian citizenry and inaugurate a political revolt against Italy's democratic institutions.

[17] This piece, alongside Kassák's poems calling for pacifism during World War I, led to his work being confiscated by Hungarian authorities and his art being banned from publication.