Fontana began his sculptural career at his father’s firm where he would make funerary busts out of plaster or marble. In 1928, he enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera where he started training as a neoclassical sculptor. However, soon after leaving the Accademia, the artist started to divert from the conventional rules of sculpture, finding his authentic and innovative artistic voice in a more radical approach.

In 1935, Fontana first visited the small town of Albisola where he began to use clay as a medium, in the workshop of the Futurist ceramist, Tullio Mazzotti. This began the younger artist’s lifelong devotion to ceramics, a sculptural medium that he valued for its expressive potential and the humble and historic connotations of the clay material.

Battaglia was made in 1947, the year Fontana returned to Europe after seven years living in Argentina during the war years. This is among his earliest examples of this subject, that he represented both freeform, such as the present work, and on varying supports such as plates and vases. This piece exemplifies the artist’s innovative treatment of a timeless subject, blurring the boundary between figuration and abstraction, evoking the frenzy of the battle, while also indicating his radical tendencies towards a purely Spatialist art, exploding the traditional confines of the artwork and engaging with the surrounding space. This is among the most ostensibly Baroque interpretation of the Battaglia works, its highly ornate decoration and balanced polychrome surfaces heightening the sense of movement.