The Casting of the 20th Century: A History of the Fonderia Artistica Battaglia

On entering the Battaglia Foundry, one is instantly made aware of an abstract sensation – a sensation of being in a place where the past and present fuse into a timeless stream, as occurs with each pouring, each time that form takes on substance. In 1913, in the fifteenth century location of Simonetta, three partners - Ercole Battaglia (ex-director of the foundry Necchi), Giulio Pogliani and Riccardo Frigerio - founded the “Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Pogliani e Frigerio”. The climate in the art world was that of the “fin-de-siècle” in which contrasting artistic notions fused in the decadently ephemeral notions of Liberty, a movement that was already set against the backdrop of the futurist clamour; but the avant-garde spirit of this era would only partially influence the activities of the foundry – at Battaglia the sense of transition, inherent in the years which bridge the two centuries, was still tangible. The three partners launched their own enterprise after years of work in other artistic foundries, and thanks to their previous experiences, they immediately earned the favour of many great artists of the period. From Vercelli to Vicenza, passing through Milan, artists chose to cast their works at Battaglia: Vitaliano Marchini for the reproduction of his figures, Giambattista Tedeschi, Luigi Panzeri and Antonio Rescaldini, and later Guido Righetti, Enrico Astori, Alfredo Sassi, Confalonieri, Paolo Sozzi and Giulio Branca. Milan was at the crossroads of this historic intersection, and its position was marked by the increasingly impressive rooms of its imposing museums and monuments: from the life like Antelopes of Guido Righetti at the Museum of Natural History,to the Concezione of 1921 by Adolfo Wildt (Milan 1968-1931) at the Museum of Science and Technology, and of course in its magnificent cemetery, Cimitero Monumentale, where in prayer and remembrance the aesthetic experience unites the sacred and the profane. After only a few months of the foundry’s activity, the Second World War broke out: two of the partners were called to military service, but were exonerated from service at arms in merit of their professional abilities and were consequentially sent to head up an industrial foundry. These were hard years, but the work continued – by day at the industrial foundry, by night at Battaglia. In the meanwhile, as the war drew to a close, Ercole Battaglia’s brother, Vittorio, returned to Italy from America – drawn to his roots by a sense of nostalgia for the timeless art of bronze casting – and it was his arrival that signalled the revival of the foundry’s activity. Following the addition of Vittorio, Francesco Vecchi joined the group as a new partner and the Foundry went on to acquire the factory and surrounding land at N° 13 Via Gran San Bernardo. The protagonists of this new era would give a voice to the pain caused by the war and the collective desire to commemorate its losses; the passage into the new century had been brusquely interrupted by the war and the tone of reckless youth that had been fundamental to the historic avant-garde movements had matured into a new order. The tireless genius of Giannino Castiglioni united with the knowledgeable team at Battaglia on many occasions; Castiglioni, together with Gaetano Moretti, went on to project the column supporting the Flag pole donated by the Italian Colony to the city of Buenos Aires and also the Monument to the Fallen at Magenta (1925), while the figures of The Last Supper of the Edicola Campari (1935, Cimitero Monumentale, Milan), created a solemn dialogue with the surrounding space, re-interpreting the by Leonardo in one of the most famous monuments of the entire Milanese cemetery complex. Today, our eyes do not necessarily see that the background of the cemetery was based on “the poetic realisation of the rights of political and religious liberty”, to be forged in the eternity of bronze. In 1935 the Chief of Internal Security for the “Commemoration of those fallen in the Great War”, headed by General Ugo Cei and Colonel Soddu, entrusted the creation of the bronzes destined to be placed in the cemeteries of war to Fonderia Battaglia: Montegrappa (1935), Timavo (1937), Caporetto and Redipuglia (1938) designed by Castiglioni and Giovanni Greppi. The work was almost entirely executed in zama alloy, the fruit of a collaboration with the company Montecatini and the launch of light weight materials. In fact, with the arrival of the era of sanctions, it became a necessity to think of substituting all copper based materials with autarchic alternatives, a process which was almost entirely followed by Carlo Panzeri. Witness to this technological progress was the Italian Genius, the sculptor G. Gori, with his massive work in anticorodal, created for the company Montecatini – and placed on the banks of the Seine in occasion of the International Exhibition of 1936 in Paris. In these years, Paris was the heart of the so-called “Republic of the Arts”. A city which openly embraced the many spirits and international progress which created its climate of diversity and allowed for a vigorous exchange of ideas: from the historic avant-garde until the call to order - “Rappel à l’ordre” - of the years spanning the period between the two world wars.

In Italy, the echoing call of traditionalists to return to values of the past was translated in the movement of the Novecento Italiano – a movement which would find its most complete expression in the works of Arturo Martini (Treviso 1889 - Milan 1947), a protagonist in the foundry’s history, alongside those of Francesco Messina (Linguaglossa, Catania, 1900 - Milan 1995) and Ludovico Pogliani (Milan 1857 - Santa Maria del Monte 1950). La Pisana, La Ragazza al sole and the Figliol Prodigo are, not by chance, the synthesis of a plastic vision defined by “precision of one’s mark, decided colours and resolute form” – the characteristics of the movement created by Sarfatti and Sironi were the expression of a collective sentiment in a nation which, as of 1922, was almost entirely Fascist. War advanced once again and in the foundry the approach was that “one looks to the future marking one’s steps”. Vecchi died, and the sons of the founding partners, Giovanni Frigerio and Sergio Pogliani, left for military service, but in the meanwhile, Libero Frizzi, a collaborator at the Foundry since 1922 as Wax model technician, entered the company as partner, and with him an atmosphere of renewal which lead to the subsequent restructuring of the foundry and construction of new, bigger work spaces. The last work to be cast on the original premises is one of four equestrian groups which Italy would donate to the United States of America for the Pantheon in Washington: an enormous horse with a female figure at its was erected in all of its majestic glory on the banks of the Potomac river. Everything that took place following 1945 would, philosophically speaking, be found on the opposite bank of the river, whose course had been directed by the war years. The Second World War had “demolished” the world as it was known with unprecedented violence. In Italy lone voices sounded from the core of a divided nation isolated from the rest of Europe, announcing their traditionalist thoughts as forms of the present: the echo of Etruscan Italicism in the figures of Marino Marini (Pistoia 1901 – Viareggio 1980) or in the Romanic-Gothicism recollections in the works of Giacomo Manzù (Bergamo 1908 – Rome 1991). Giacomo Manzù, Enrico Manfrini, Remo Brioschi, Eros Pellini, Marino Marini and subsequently Lucio Fontana, Luciano Minguzzi, Carmelo Cappello, Arnaldo and Giò Pomodoro, Ettore Cedraschi and many others formed the group that gravitated around the foundry and indeed, carried the challenges faced by Battaglia, pushing to improve the artistic and technical systems of the various departments of the foundry (die casting, shell casting and sand casting) in order to obtain the maximum from the lost wax casting process. The perfect form of the sphere in the sculptural works of Arnaldo Pomodoro (Marciano di Romagna 1926) was a conscientiously created contrast to the insecurities inherent in the new era; at its heart, once the apparent perfection of the superfice has been breached, the difficulties and the trouble path which had led to its realisation is clearly visible. These are the years in which the “centrality of the plastic sculptural form opens itself to the constant presence of the environment”, and it is during this period that Lucio Fontana (Rosario di Santa Fè, Argentina, 1899 – Comabbio, Varese, 1968) invents the third dimension - allowing for the canvas and sculpture itself to be penetrated by the environment. The first work to be cast in the new location in via Stilicone follows in the wake of continuity; finally the majestic project for the bronze doors of the Milan Cathedral could be realised (1945), a project created by Castiglioni and constructed by the Cappellini company for the Veneranda Fabbrica Duomo before the outbreak of the war. The atmosphere in Milan in the years following the war is vibrant and energetic; The Milanese Academy of Fine Arts (l’Accademia) had been a cardinal point of artistic interest for more than a decade, successfully uniting many great names of the era: Alik Cavaliere, Floriano Bodini, Giancarlo Marchesi, Giacomo Benevelli, Liliana Nocera and Kengiro Azuma, all of whom continued to cast their works at the Battaglia Foundry between 1954 and 1955. Following the deaths of the partners Frizzi and Monteverde before the war, a vigorous new flux of commercial energy came to the Foundry with the now emphasized presence of Ercole Staffico. In the first two years in the foundry’s new premises, Battaglia was responsible for a multitude of castings in many fields – sculptural, architectural, mechanic and purely functional. “We continue and will always continue to work with a renewed sense of passion and ardour for our work in art”, by land and by sea, where in front of a wall of gorgonie (algae) stands, in the depths of the sea at San Fruttuoso, the Cristo degli Abissi (Christ of the abyss) by Guido Galletti, dedicated to the victims of the seas and a symbol of every mariner. In 1958 Narciso Cassino of Candia Lomellina (1914-2003) finished the casting of the Madonna della Guardia. On the 27th of August 1959, the statue of the Virgin, measuring 14 metres in height, one of the largest sculptures in bronze known to history, was installed thanks to a complex process of manoeuvres, on the summit of the tower of the religious sanctuary of the same name, planned by Galli.

During the war and up until 1969 the industrial branch of the foundry was expanded (die casting, shell casting and sand casting), and it was in this period that the Foundry produced the “carter” for Vespa. Giovanni Frigerio, the Technical director of the foundry between 1957-1971, who specialized in the designing of iron and steel support structures for sculpture, would be the engineer responsible for the realisation of works by Arnaldo Pomodoro. More than 40 labourers worked for the foundry, and at the time many publishing houses also collaborated in the publishing of works realised on it premises.

In 1958 the Door of Siena’s Cathedral by Enrico Manfrini was cast, a work in bronze with a brass core. The frame was constructed using slats 3 metres in length, folded to the millimetre and fixed using special screws which were rolled and embossed. In these years, anti-oxidising steel did not yet exist, and so the structure was realised in brass – a material with similar mechanical characteristics. The foundry was a forge of works destined to become symbols of an artistic century, like the horses of the Rai of 1961, or simply works which would leave an eternal spiritual impression on the generation and indeed on many to come.

In merit of its work in these years the foundry received the honorary tribute of the Ambrogino d’Oro in 1961, a prestigious prize awarded to those institutions whose level of distinction in the field of knowledge adds to the lustre of the city of Milan.

In these years however, Italy was fixated by the achievements of “the other continent”, as indeed was the foundry. From the other side of the ocean the “American Battle Monuments Commission” entrusted the realisation of many monuments in bronze for its military cemeteries and war memorials to the foundry – these works were to be located all over the world - for example, the Australian War Memorial in commemoration of the Marines of Camberra (1966) and numerous equestrian monuments were cast as monuments to those cities and nations which had witnessed and survived the brutal destruction caused by the war. The foundry was located in the world, and in exchange the world played its part in the foundry: in its large studio the foundry hosted many artists, both Italian and foreign, giving them the opportunity to work and rework their models, large and small, in situ and finally, to translate these works into the eternal material of bronze. The expert workers of any foundry are men whose expertise is the driving motor at the heart of the artistic process: at Battaglia this is doubly true, both in the casting process and in the creation of history. In the post-war years they worked every day except Monday, and often through the night, and it is said that often “one slept in the foundry to keep feeding coal to the furnaces”. In 1974 the foundry gave the horses of Messina to the Presidente Leone, while in 1979 it cast the copies of the famous Byzantine horses, plated in gold and silver, that figure above the central portal of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice. The continuation of these prestigious creations would become more difficult during the ‘60’s when the three founding partners died few years apart. It had been said that “The people of a foundry are not easy people”, just as the work of the foundry had not been easy during the years in which it existed thanks only to those who carried out the work of many due to “those from Brera” who came to the foundry expecting “courses in exchange for the use of furnace”. At the beginning of the 1970’s the sons of the founding partners Frigerio and Pogliani wanted to sell the foundry, (1970-71), but the workers, in a desperate attempt to avoid this eventuality, forcefully occupied the foundry. Their attempt to find an agreement that satisfied all parties resulted in the following compromise: Staffico bought the property on which, to this day, the foundry is located, allowing the partners to pay off all debts with suppliers and liquidate the workers. At this point the workers took control of the foundry by forming a workers’ cooperative and in turn, assumed the responsibility of completing all work in course within the following two months. The industrial branch of the foundry was closed and the 6 workers who remained from the original team of 50, outsourced additional skilled labour, “involving all those who were good enough”, in order to guarantee the continuity of their craft. These difficult chapters in the history of the foundry did not in any way diminish the institution’s fame, both in Italy and abroad. The foundry’s relationship with clients and artists was, and had always been, based on trust and unquestionable expertise, and for this reason, in 1992, the Rodin Foundation entrusted the restoration of a sculpture by Rodin to Battaglia. During the 1970’s the Belgian artist Mariette Teugels, introduced to the European art world by Otto Waldemar (1929), Hildebrand and Wider, chose Battaglia for her castings. She was followed by Domenico Colanzi (Archi 1944), a constant presence in the life of Battaglia, who began to cast his “soft synthetic plastic realisations of timeless moments of humanity” at the foundry, playing with the material and its contrasting qualities. In 1990, the director Franco Badalotti retired, but was sceptical about the workers’ ability to maintain the business. The casting of the monument “I Sette Gottinga di Hannover (1998)” (1998) by Floriano Bodini (Gemonio, Varese, 1933 – Milano, 2005) kept the foundry occupied for two years and the artist’s presence became a constant part of the laboratories functions. The special relationship between Bodini and the Pope Paolo VI, whose statue by the artist, completed in 1986, is one of the main expressions of his artistic “work”. His death in 2005 left a void which, only that which an artist transmits of himself through his work can fill. During Tangentopoli a sensation of stagnancy spread, but in reality, the force behind the foundry was not be extinguished – a force embodied by the invincible strength and faith of the artists. Giovanni Bruno, Dario Goldaniga, Paolo delle Monache, Pier Giorgio Colombara, Abdullah Selim, Sergio Alberti and Guido Lodigiani made up a group of young artists whose worked marked the end of the ‘90’s, a period marked by many complex generational changes and the end of the social ideology linked to the rites connected to death and its ritual traditions. It is in this atmosphere that the bronze sculpture - La Meridiana of Sendai – of 1997 was completed at the foundry by Kengiro Azuma (Yagamata 1926). The work represented a symbol of time, and of the bridge between two places, equally adored: Japan, the artist’s home, and Milan – the city in which the artist had lived and worked for many years – starting out as assistant to Marino Marini and finally coming into his own as a protagonist of the city’s artistic panorama in the years which followed. A year before his death, Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) passed through the doors of Battaglia – to cast a work which represented the artist’s thoughts on the theme of existential nature: l’Autoritratto (1993) is a work which, with momentary irony, expresses the artist’s conscious awareness of the imminence of the end. The present director, Danilo Bosio, began working at the foundry in 1988, as a wax technician. The nineties was a difficult period for Battaglia but in the figure of Presidente Matteo Visconti the foundry found the stability which it much needed. With this new partnership, Battaglia could move into the new Century arm in arm with its protagonists.

The works of Arnaldo Pomodoro became features of many locations of spiritual and social importance; in 1990 one of his spheres took position in the Courtyard of the Pine in the Vaticani Gardens and, in 1996 in front of the headquarters of the UN in New York. Works in bronze, such as the baptistery by Guido Lodigiani for the Duomo of Casale Monferrato (2006), with their symbolic core, an essence which can only be created in a living material like that of bronze - forged in an eternal flame, became symbolic of a new kind of pilgrimage. The fusion of the cross and the altar base realised by Arnaldo Pomodoro for the new church of the Padre Pio, designed by Renzo Piano in 1999, proved particularly complicated. On occasion of the jubilee in 2000 it is to Floriano Bodini that the honour of the project for the Holy door of San Giovanni in Laterano is awarded. In 2004, Giuseppe Penone, one of the principal artists to represent the Italian movement of Arte Povera and protagonist of the Venice Biennale of 2007, completes his installation for the palace of Venaria Reale, while his 28metre tree in bronze in the Tuelleries gardens in Paris (2000) left an unmissable impression on his artistic research into the perception of nature’s sovereignty in the research of form and substance. From 1913 to the present, the Fonderia Battaglia has carried the ancient tradition of artistic bronze casting and has played an inextricable role in the growth of the artistic protagonist of the era. The role of art galleries, which in the last twenty years has overtaken the power of museums in the definition and promotion of new artistic tendencies, has married well with the activity of the foundry. The collaboration with Nicola Loi during the ‘90’s created the opportunity to cast works of great value, such as the multiples of Francesco Messina and the works of Pier Giorgio Colombara, Paolo delle Monache, Giovanni Bruno, Giacomo Manzù and Giuliano Vangi, while recently, the friendship of Giancarlo Pedrazzini and the “Fabbrica Eos” has brought a breath of fresh air to the foundry in the form of works for the new millennium by Giovanni Sesia, Enzo Fiore, Dario Goldaniga, David Reimondo, Gaetano Fracassio and Corrado Levi. The history of Battaglia is intricately entwined with that of the city of Milan, it “traces the arc of the Italian sculptural tradition in the twentieth century” and looks to its nation through the eyes of the expert craftsmen and artists, who are “citizens by law of the great Republic of the Arts”, from a viewpoint, that of the foundry, in which the constant creative flux renders the space, its workers and its activities immune to the passing of time. Carlotta Loverini