The immediate precedents for Burri's pictorial language lie in Cubism, Dada and especially Futurism. Cubist and Dada collage provided a rich source of ideas. However, the Futurists, in their insistence that all sorts of materials are valid for use in art and in their perception that the material can have a life of its own, proved in the long run to be the most fertile source.

By the late 1940s, Burri began to push the exploration of matter to a fundamental transformation, rejecting pictorial metaphors he turned instead to brute material, to objects ravaged by time and discarded as waste, to sacks, rags, old shirts, tin-can tops and scrap metal. From his early "Sack" paintings, of which Sacco is a part, the rips and stitches came more and more to resemble wounds sewn up in real flesh, and the materials were subjected to infinite lacerations and unravellings. Since Burri's aim had always been to achieve a powerful aesthetic result, the act of lacerating, cauterizing, opening up the wound, piercing it and stitching it back together with the needle, was always integrated in the overall tension of an artistic composition.