Lipizzan

Maximilian II of Austria founded a royal stud on Spanish horses at Kladrub in 1560, in what is now the Czech Republic. His brother, Archduke Charles, set up another around 1580 in the village of Lipica near Trieste, now in Slovenia, and that village gave the breed its name. The two studs worked closely together and both supplied the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, until their breeding goals drifted apart and the Kladruby split off as a heavier carriage horse.

Every Lipizzan alive traces to a handful of foundation stallions from the late 1700s and early 1800s. The Conservancy documents six classical lines, Pluto, Conversano, Favory, Neapolitano, Siglavy and Maestoso; the international registries recognize eight, adding Tulipan and Incitato.

The 1900s nearly ended it: the collapse of the Habsburg empire, then the Second World War, when the breeding stock was concentrated at Hostau and rescued in 1945 by General Patton's Third Army in Operation Cowboy, 375 Lipizzans among 1,200 horses. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s hit the breed again. Maria Jeritza brought the first Lipizzans to America in 1937, and Tempel Farms, founded in 1958, keeps the largest private herd in the country. In 2022 UNESCO inscribed Lipizzan breeding traditions on its intangible cultural heritage list.

Compact and powerful: 1,000 to 1,300 pounds, with the Conservancy giving 15.1 to 15.2 hands and the international standard 14.2 to 15.2. A long head with a flat or convex profile, a muscular arched neck, a deep wide chest and powerful shoulders.

They are gray, not white. Foals are born bay or black and lighten year by year, finishing white between roughly four and ten years old. A dark young Lipizzan is normal, not a fault.

Docile, rates the Conservancy, with a novice experience level and superior balance and gait in its notes.

The Spanish Riding School takes six years to train a stallion to its standard, which says as much about the horse as the standard: the breed's temperament is what makes that training possible.

Classical dressage is the identity: the Spanish Riding School in Vienna performs the airs above the ground on Lipizzan stallions exclusively, in a riding-hall tradition dating to 1572.

Outside Vienna they compete in modern dressage and driving, and Europe's state studs, Piber in Austria and Lipica in Slovenia among them, maintain the classical stock.

Regular checks under the tail. Lipizzans are gray, and melanoma is most common in gray horses from about five years old. A study of 296 gray Lipizzans found melanomas in half of them, and in 51 of the 68 horses older than 15; three in four were under the tail. None of the affected horses in that study suffered a severe clinical effect or lost performance, and the authors found melanomas in gray horses less malignant than in solid-colored horses.

If you show, plan around the stallion rules. The Conservancy notes that Lipizzans show under US Equestrian Federation rules, which do not allow children to exhibit stallions.

The Livestock Conservancy lists the Lipizzan as Threatened. As of 2012 there were about 11,000 registered worldwide, 9,000 of them in Europe and around 1,700 in the Americas.

The population is unusually institutional: nine European state studs carry much of it, with private breeders and the North American registries carrying the rest.

In the US the registry is the United States Lipizzan Federation, under the Lipizzan International Federation. The pedigree should trace to the classical stallion lines; that traceability is most of what the papers certify.

Buy the color knowingly. A gray grays out: the dark two-year-old will be white by around ten, and the parents tell you where it is heading.

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