It was destroyed with dynamite on 29 January 1961 by Austrian terrorists, but the imposing equestrian statue made in 1936 on commission of the Montecatini Company, by sculptor Giorgio Gori at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Pogliani and Frigerio, before finding its place in front of the Ponte Gardena hydroelectric power station in Bozen, had been placed, under the name of Italic Genius, on the banks of the Seine for the Paris World Exhibition of 1937. This work, of which only the head remains today, preserved at the Das Tirol-Panorama museum in Innsbruck, is the one that, together with the General Commission for Honours to the Fallen in War commissions for the bronzes in the war cemeteries of Montegrappa (1935), Timavo (1937), Caporetto and Redipuglia (1938), best represents the Foundry’s activities in the 1930s.

A production that recounts not only the era of sanctions and the substitution of copper materials with the autarchic aluminium - a process entirely heeded by Carlo Panzeri - but also that return to order and to a figurative art of neoclassicist inspiration, embodied by the Novecento movement, expression of an Italy that, from 1922, was almost entirely fascist.The echo of that exhortation to a return to traditional values was interpreted at the Foundry by the works of Arturo Martini such as La Pisana (The Pisa Woman, 1928) and The Prodigal Son (1928), but also by those of Francesco Messina and Ludovico Pogliaghi. Even though the war pressed on, Francesco Vecchi was dead, Giovanni Frigerio and Sergio Pogliani, sons of the other historical partners and pillars of the Foundry, were called to serve in the army, with the enlargement of the working areas and the entry into the company of the sculptor and wax worker Libero Frizzi, in spite of all that was happening, lungs were filled with an air of renewal.

Sacrifice, a monumental equestrian group in gilded bronze, created in 1928 by the American sculptor Leo Friedlander (1888-1966) for one of the four plinths of the Arlington Memorial Bridge over the Potomac River in Washington, was to be the last work cast - in 1950 - in the old premises of the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia: a gift from Italy to the United States of America, as a sign of gratitude for American assistance in the reconstruction after the Second World War. But even as the violence of the war seemed to have swept away the world as it was before, the Foundry demonstrated, inaugurating new premises in Via Stilicone, that it believed in the future without forgetting the past, indeed producing as its first casting a truly traditional work: the bronze door of the Duomo of Milan, designed by Giannino Castiglioni before the war and set in place in 1950.

The post-war years in Milan were marked by a great frenzy, with artists such as Marino Marini, Giacomo Manzù, Lucio Fontana, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro challenging the Foundry on a technical and artistic level in the mid-1950s, demanding more and more from casting techniques; In the meantime, after the death of Libero Frizzi, the company was driven by Ercole Staffico’s business experience, and Battaglia dealt with a great number of castings for the sculptural, the architectural, the mechanical and functional parts.

Among these are Guido Galletti’s Christ of the Abyss, immersed on 29 August 1954 at a depth of 18 metres in front of the Abbey of San Fruttuoso in Camogli (GE), made from the fusion of medals, bells and propellers of American submarines, and Narciso Cassino’s Madonna della Guardia (Madonna of the Guard), which, measuring 14 metres in height, is one of the largest bronze castings in the world. It was situated on 27 August 1959 in the homonymous sanctuary in Tortona and blessed by Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, who two months later would be elected Pope with the name John XXIII.

Thanks to the parallel development of the industrial foundry activity that had begun with the war, Battaglia also produced the casings for the Piaggio Vespa engines in these years. With Giovanni Frigerio - technical director from 1957 to 1971 - he designed steel structures (very useful for Arnaldo Pomodoro’s sculptures), and developed innovative technical solutions, such as the special frame for the bronze and brass door of the Duomo of Siena, made in 1958.

In the 1960s, colossal lost-wax castings of horses were made at the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia. The motif bears the name of one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century in Italy, Francesco Messina (1900 - 1995), who in 1964 was commissioned by RAI director general Marcello Bernardi to create what has become the very symbol of the company: the Dying Horse, which has stood in front of the main entrance of the viale Mazzini headquarters in Rome since 5 November 1966. The monumental sculpture, made in the Foundry by reproducing the sketch with wooden planks anchored to an iron framework on which wax was spread, required two years of hard work and, in 1966, measuring 4.60 metres in height, 5.50 metres in length and weighing 25 quintals, it arrived in Rome after an adventurous journey from Milan on the Autostrada del Sole (Highway of the Sun).Together with the RAI horse, however, Messina had drawn and realised four others in plaster, twice the natural size  - 4.50 metres high and 6.30 metres long  - which were to be cast in bronze for a quadriga designed for the façade of the Palazzo dei Congressi (Congress Arena) at the EUR in Rome.

However, the models, about two metres high, made in 1941, remained locked away until the end of the war in the basement of the Brera Academy, of which the artist was director. They were only cast by Battaglia in 1969, paid for by Giovanni Leone, a friend of the sculptor who bought them for his private villa in Formello in the province of Rome, where they have been on display since 1970. The 1960s were the years in which the Foundry was a large communal studio for Italian and foreign artists, in which artisans worked day and night to keep the fire of the furnaces alive, and in which the Foundry was recognised for the importance of its work with the awarding of the prestigious Ambrogino d'Oro in 1961, but they were also the years in which, just a few years apart, the three founding partners passed away, with a consequent change of leadership not without contrasts.

After the horses of President Leone, others will live in the Foundry in the 1970s, such as the copy of the Byzantine horses in gilded bronze that we can still admire today above the central portal of the Basilica of St. Marco in Venice: the originals had remained on the terrace of the church until 1977, until it was decided to place them in the Marciano Museum to protect them from atmospheric damage and replace them with identical copies made by the Foundry. These were the same years in which the great Belgian sculptor Mariette Teugels (1935) chose Battaglia for her castings, followed by the sculptor Domenico Colanzi (1944), who spent years in the foundry to produce his works; but Battaglia was no longer what it once was, Frigerio and Pogliani's sons wanted to sell and the workers opposed this decision by occupying the premises in Via Stilicone.

Hence Ercole Staffico decided to buy the entire area and the buildings, allowing the heirs to pay their debts and the workers, while the latter, in keeping with the ethics that had always been characteristic of their work, founded a cooperative to complete all the work in progress. Despite everything, the foundry, having closed its industrial departments and with only six workers remaining from the fifty that they were, continues to keep its reputation high, in Italy and abroad.

The 1990s marked a difficult moment for Battaglia, which found the stability that it had long been lacking in the figure of President Matteo Visconti di Modrone, and even if director Franco Badalotti retired in 1990, sceptical about the ability of the workers to keep the business going, even if with Tangentopoli the feeling was that work had ceased completely, the foundry’s strength remained in the artists, in the trusting relationship with its patrons - which secured prestigious commissions such as the restoration of a statue for the Rodin Foundation (1992) - and in the group of young craftsmen (Giovanni Bruno, Dario Goldaniga, Paolo Delle Monache, Pier Giorgio Colombara, Abdullah Selim, Sergio Alberti and Guido Lodigiani) that marked a fundamental generational change at the end of the 1990s.The Foundry thus crosses the last decade of the 20th century hand in hand with the protagonists of the Art scene: Arnaldo Pomodoro, with works cast by Battaglia, reaches locations of spirit and power, such as the Pinecone Courtyard in the Vatican Gardens (Sphere, 1990) and the entrance to the UN headquarters in New York (Sphere within a sphere, 1996).

Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994), a year before his death, crossed the threshold of Battaglia to create Autoritratto (Self-portrait, 1993), an existential reflection that concentrates with irony an awareness of the end. Works such as Kengiro Azuma’s (1926) Meridiana di Sendai (Meridian of Sendai), created in 1997 by the Japanese artist and assistant to Marino Marini, protagonist of the city's art scene, mark the end of the socialised ideology of death and its rituals. Floriano Bodini (1933 -2005) engaged the Foundry for two years with the casting of the monument to the Seven of Göttingen in Hanover (1998). His presence became such a constant that he left a void difficult to fill when he died.The decade ended with a challenge: the casting of the cross and base for Arnaldo Pomodoro's altar (1997-2000) for the new Padre Pio church designed by Renzo Piano in San Giovanni Rotondo; a particularly complicated project from a technical point of view, but brilliantly resolved by the Foundry’s workforce.

The new millennium opens with a strongly symbolically connotated project: Floriano Bodini’s Porta Santa (Holy Door) for San Giovanni in Laterano in Rome, a fusion that kicks off a series of commissions of great historical and artistic importance.Also in 2000 the great master of the Arte Povera movement Giuseppe Penone (1947) realised a 28 metre bronze tree with Battaglia for the gardens of Le Tueleries in Paris, and in 2004 the bronze works for The Garden of Fluid Sculptures a site-specific project for the Reggia of Venaria Reale in Turin. In 2006, Guido Lodigiani (1959) created the Baptismal Font, the Candelabrum and a painted bronze Trinity for the Duomo of Casale Monferrato at the Foundry. It is precisely the search for different patinas and layers in bronze that will guide the Foundry in the years to follow, which, as of 2013, catalogues no less than 150 different chromatic reactions of bronze, creating one of the most complete sample collections in the world.From 2014, Battaglia set up an experimental project with some of the most important representatives of international contemporary art design such as Formafantasma and Michael Anasstasiades, collaborating with research galleries such as Dimorestudio and Nilufar.

In 2015, the foundry hosted the shooting of Francesco Clerici’s Berlinale-winning film, Il Gesto delle Mani (The Gesture of the Hands), which recounts Velasco Vitali’s process of creating a sculpture in the spaces of Via Stilicone: a tribute to manual work, to a team of expert craftsmen, and to a reality that already has more than 100 years of history. Attention to the art world and a lasting relationship with the artists are at the origin of the Battaglia Foundry Sculpture Prize, an international sculpture prize awarded from 2016 to 2021, established to promote the use of bronze in contemporary art, which boasts winners such as Nicolas Deshayes, Marguerite Humeau, Rochelle Goldberg, Veit Laurent Kurz and Ludovica Carbotta; alongside it, is the Open Studio project, with which the Foundry offers artists a month’s stay in its spaces and a workshop on contemporary bronze techniques.

In 2017, it was Battaglia that supported Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s project for the Italian Pavilion at the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale, and that realised Takumi Craftmanship Stool, the project by Formafantasma exhibited at the CURIO exhibition at Art Basel/Miami.Battaglia further demonstrates its focus on design with the appointment of Nicolas Bellavance-Lecompte as Artistic Director of the Foundry’s Design-Art Department, who from 2018 to 2021 realises a series of projects with Anton Alvarez, Katie Stout and a number of international galleries, while as far as contemporary art is concerned, it will develop, together with Ilaria Marotta and Andrea Baccin of Cura., a Milanese exhibition project - KURA. - which involves, from 2018 to 2020, artists such as David Douard, Than Hussein Clark, Yves Scherer and Patrizio di Massimo.

But the relationship with art and artists is never interrupted, and in 2022 Paola Pivi (1971) creates at Battaglia her projects for the New York High Line art programme curated by Cecilia Alemani: You know who I am is a bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, with her face covered by the stylised mask of an emoji. Furthermore, in 2023, with the appointment of Bernabò Visconti di Modrone as the new President and CEO, the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia instituted the Visconti Prize, not only to commemorate its president Matteo Visconti, but also to keep on supporting artists in the production of bronze works, owing to the experience of its workforce.