The amazing story of Satyr: from impotent stallion to "Napoleon's horse"

On 1 October 1872 the Marquis Colonel Giovanni Costabili purchased an English thoroughbred stallion in England, on behalf of the Italian Government, for use in army repositories. This horse, named Satyr, was then active as a breeder in Italy between the end of 1872 and 1887, when it was finally sold to a private farmer due to impotence and old age. In 1889 Satyr was slaughtered and his remains were given to the Royal Veterinary School of Milan, in order to prepare a whole mounted skeleton. This was made in 1890 by Dr. Ugo Barpi, who was at that time assistant professor of Anatomy, and it became one of the equine skeletons for educational use at the School, among which there was already the famous skeleton of the Arabian horse, that was ridden by Napoleon in the Egyptian campaign, probably identifiable as Tamerlan and donated by Viceroy Beauharnais to the Veterinary School of Milan (Rinaldi et al, 2022). At the end of the 20th century, the only horse skeleton still present in the former Institute of Anatomy of Domestic Animals was significantly identified and named as “Napoleon’s horse”. The analysis of a valuable bibliographic source found in the archives, in which Dr. Barpi himself gives us some accurate morphological and morphometric information (Barpi 1892), has now enabled us to identify that skeleton as Satyr, and not Tamerlan. But if Satyr took his place in the collective memory at the end of the century, what really happened to the skeleton of Napoleon’s horse?