von Helen Sibila

Hanno, a young elephant, came to Rome from India as a gift to the pope in the 16th century, while Harambe, a gorilla, inhabited zoos in the United States until his death in 2016. Both animals became immortalized in their appearance and re-appearance in images and text, raising questions of similarity and difference between meme-ing behaviors, crude humor in the face of death, political parody, and media affordances in two very different times.  

Writing about Harambe in 2025 feels behind the times—but not so much compared to another animal of note, Hanno, an elephant who died in Rome in 1516.  Although they lived and died before their natural times 500 years apart, these two mammals provide poignantly parallel examples of how animals can become iterated symbols after death. Hanno the elephant (aka “Annone” in Italian) was a gift from King Manuel I of Portugal to the newly elected Pope Leo X in 1514, a son of the Renaissance powerhouse family of Medici. Harambe was a western lowland gorilla born in a zoo in Texas and infamously killed in a zoo in Cincinnati in 2016. Their lives after death share a number of similarities despite their different historical contexts. Both teetered between beloved icon, subject of vulgar jokes, and symbol of political or religious critique. With both Hanno and Harambe’s deaths, sincere public mourning occurred alongside satirical and comedic uses of the animals that parody systems of power and contemporary cultural trends. However, the differences in the media in which their images survive and who could partake in the use of those media betrays the chasm of time, material, and media technology between Hanno and Harambe. 

Hanno the Elephant

Hanno the elephant was a young white elephant from India shipped to Portugal around 1510.¹ In 1514 he traveled from Lisbon to Rome as part of a diplomatic-religious offering to the new Pope, Leo X. A son of the wealthy and vastly influential Medici family, the often hedonistic pontiff (formerly Cardinal Giovanni de’Medici) “embodied Florentine humanistics culture at its height,” according to Silvio Bedini, author of the preeminent book about Hanno’s life and death.² However, the obese pontiff also spent lavishly, made a poor judge of character when it came to appointments of positions and titles, and gave little heed to calls for reform from followers of Martin Luther and others. He “represented the worst as well as the best features of the Renaissance” in Italy and Rome.³ Hanno’s voyage from Lisbon to Leo X in Rome was difficult. The dry roads hurt his feet, and frantically swarming onlookers repeatedly invaded any quiet moments of rest. At multiple stops, crowds destroyed villa walls and other structures sheltering Hanno, and the chaos and noise of their clamor caused the “frightened little elephant” to become “increasingly distressed.”⁴ After Hanno arrived in Rome, he became a favorite pet of Leo X, and had his own dedicated quarters and team of caretakers. He frequently appeared before the public in lavish parades and spectacles, although they often caused him to panic. While Pope Leo X adored the finer arts and letters, he also had a penchant for “buffoons,” of whom the papal court made fun. Jokes and ridiculous spectacles at these buffoons’ expense often included Hanno. For example, many images of the elephant depict a festival thrown by the Pope that culminated in the crowning of one of his favored buffoons, called Barabello, as “arch poet” of the Vatican. Born into a respected family, Barabello was an important abbot before his grasp on reality withered (by modern standards, he likely suffered from some mental illness). He considered himself to be a great poet, and Pope Leo enthusiastically played into this delusion for the entertainment of his court. Barabello rode atop Hanno in a parade to his parody coronation only to be thrown off when Hanno inevitably panicked, adding to the ridiculousness of the spectacle.⁵ Pope Leo X also offered the public access to Hanno every Sunday, meaning that nearly everyone in Rome and the surrounding areas was aware of and likely saw the elephant. In less than two years after his arrival in Rome, Hanno took ill. Despite the care of Rome’s best doctors, which naturally included bloodletting and a purgative consisting mostly of gold, the ailing elephant passed away in June 1516.⁶ Hanno’s image lives on to this day in sketches, paintings, frescoes, and written works.⁷

Harambe the Gorilla

Harambe the gorilla was born in 1997 in a Texas zoo and was moved about a decade later to the Cincinnati Zoo to socialize.⁸ Then, on May 28, 2016, a young boy (some sources say 3 years old, other say 4) accidentally fell into the gorillas’ enclosure. Harambe did not follow his fellow gorillas into their interior enclosure and instead began “violently dragging and throwing the child.”⁹ In order to save the boy’s life, zoo employees fatally shot Harambe. The entire debacle was filmed on a phone and posted to YouTube shortly after and went viral in news and social media sites.¹⁰ The most immediate responses were centered around the incident itself and dealt with animal rights and who or what was at fault. “Weird Twitter,” however quickly appropriated Harambe, and the gorilla’s legacy quickly exploded into random memes, songs, viral pranks, and political jokes.¹¹ Harambe’s image still frequently appears in posts mourning deceased celebrities.¹²

The Two Animals and their Appearances in Media

The most immediate similarity between Hanno and Harambe lies in the proliferation of images of the animals following their deaths. In Hanno’s case, multiple artists like Raphael made sketches, engravings, and frescoes featuring similar representations of the elephant.¹³ Other artists then frequently sketched or otherwise reproduced these images, resulting in a scattered body of works with strikingly similar depictions of Hanno. Sketches of Hanno by Giulio Romano, for example, clearly reappear in iterations of another often-reproduced image depicting the triumph of Scipio as well as in representations of menageries in popular books of the time.¹⁴ Similarly, while Harambe appears in a firsthand eyewitness video and zoo photographs, images and gifs of the gorilla propagated mimetically in huge volumes in the months after his death. Sycophantic poets trying to please the Pope with verses praising Hanno bear an eerie similarity to Elon Musk’s bid for popularity via his song, “RIP Harambe” (which he released three years after Harambe’s death).¹⁵ However, frescoes by Raphael and prints in books, which were still a very emergent medium in the 16th century, are very different from a viral change.org petition and Facebook posts loosely united via hashtags. Although meme-ification on the scale of Harambe simply was not yet afforded by any early modern media, the repeated de- and re-contextualization of Hanno’s likeness clearly shows traces of meme-like behavior. In this way, Hanno is something like an early modern ancestor to a meme, a “proto-meme” of sorts.

Both Hanno’s and Harambe’s postmortem existences as symbols show a similar tendency for vulgarity in the more comedic uses of their images. Perhaps in part because they are animals—they are like us humans, but not quite—their deaths have more room for ridiculization. After Hanno’s death many critics of the Holy See used the elephant to illustrate and satirize the blatant corruption of Leo’s papal court. Such poems, plays, and more casual public writings often use crude and visceral imagery of Hanno’s death to illustrate their points. Bedini writes that „Hanno’s death and the pope’s sincere mourning for his pet provided the critics of the Church with new opportunities to ridicule the great affection the pontiff had demonstrated for the elephant and the many affections he had lavished upon it.”¹⁶ One work, The Last Will and Testament of Hanno, a mock document listing the elephant’s final wishes, “exploded like a bomb” in Leo X’s court. Usually attributed to Pietro d’Aretino (called “the scourge of princes” for his biting verses), Hanno bequeaths his belongings and his body parts to cardinals, clerks, his custodians, and others, giving a reason for each wish. He asks, for example, that his testicles go to a cardinal known for his philandering so he could be “more fruitful in his progeny.”¹⁷ The parody will and testament similarly lampoons other clerics and cardinals for their corruption, schemes to assassinate Pope Leo X, and embezzlement, among other crimes and faults.¹⁸ In another vicious postmortem ode, the official court poet Beroaldo was inspired by a joke circulating among courtiers at the time: Giovanni Gazoldo, one of Leo’s favorite buffoons and resident glutton of the Vatican, should be “made to dine on the flesh of the papal pet” as part of a lavish feast.¹⁹ In doing so, Hanno, whose body bore the “arch-poet” Barabello, could “now be sepulchered in the body of Gazoldo.”²⁰ Some caricatures involving Hanno exist in visual media,²¹ but Hanno’s use in comedy and satire is far more common in written work. By comparison, absurd and comedic memes using Harambe’s image are numerous, with smaller amounts of text. Although one can find similarities in the use of both animals in funny material, the preferred formats (or at least the formats that have survived the 500 years since Hanno’s death) show how different the worlds of Hanno and Harambe are in terms of media technology and communication.

The vulgar and absurd use of an animal’s death in such works about Hanno feels similar to the crude humor of the hashtag #dicksoutforharambe. Started by online comedian Brandon Wardell, the phrase initially provided a general mourning cry for the gorilla but evolved into the organization of an event in which participants would expose their genitals together at the White House in solidarity with the fallen gorilla.²² The trending phrase seems at least partially like a loose satirical response to the genuine #JusticeForHarambe hashtag and petition on change.org that called for investigation into the child’s parents and home life.²³ Other Harambe memes, like an image of the gorilla in a photoshopped-on flower crown, are more silly than lewd. Comparison to the mentioned uses of Hanno as a symbol, however, expose the vast difference between the involved media in the 16th century and those of 2016. Although the very recent invention of the printing press vastly accelerated the reproduction of written and illustrative works, they were by no means a mass media or anywhere near the scale of a hashtag that goes viral and results in a subreddit, multiple Facebook groups, T-shirts for sale, and an event in less than three months.²⁴ Additionally, the authors of the plays, parodies, and verses about Hanno were respected, highly trained poets welcomed at noble courts, who created their works for the small percentage of the public able to understand the references, let alone read them. Although similarities could be drawn between online meme personalities and a humorous court poet, an unavoidable chasm exists between the two.

The uses of Hanno and Harambe as parts of political critique show similar differences. A letter to Ulrich von Hutten (Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian II’s envoy to Rome and “an austere German”) uses Hanno as “the basis for one of the first published criticisms leveled against [Pope Leo X] by supporters of Martin Luther.”²⁵ Hanno is also mentioned in anonymous public posting written “on behalf of servants and clerics of the pope and cardinals” threatening the loss of “the elephant, lions and other beasts…” if the pope did not bestow favors upon them equal to those received by their superiors.²⁶

Another, likely written by von Hutten upon his departure from Rome, expresses his distaste for the lavishness and corruption he experienced in the Eternal City:

„Farewell buffoons, elephant, prostitutes,

Procurers, male prostitutes,

Heralds, odious ones, rapists, perjurers, thieves,

The sacrilegious, the incestuous,

Godless Rome, farewell.”²⁷

These examples exhibit more casual forms of communication media than a sumptuous fresco by Raphael or a satirical ode by a court poet. Still, they are textual, not images or a combination of images and text like most Harambe memes.

Less poetic and far more accessible, memes and related pranks involving Harambe took political turns as well. Many Harambe memes ridiculized the 2016 U.S. presidential election, like the example below suggesting that Bernie Sanders had a photo of Harambe in his home.²⁸ A frequently circulated hoax led people to believe that over 11,000 people had voted for Harambe as a write-in candidate.²⁹ Although the report was fake, the idea (and people’s readiness to believe it) drew attention to many voters’ mixed feelings and pessimism about the political process and options. In addition, the spectacle of Harambe’s death brought about heated discussion and criticism around proper parenting.³⁰

The stories of Hanno and Harambe and the similarities and differences between the two bring up larger points. The thread between the two mammals spans a long gap and huge differences in media technology and their respective affordances. Still, the content is not all that different. Why is it that publicly viewable animals dying before their time, 500 centuries apart, so readily become symbols and referents for often coarse and parodical material? The pachyderm and primate are certainly not alone in this special elevated-but-degraded position (consider Topsy, the elephant electrocuted on film at the turn of the century, Cecil the Lion, to name a few).³¹,³² While their uniting characteristics show an intriguing insight into the consistency of humor and reactions to animals as spectacle, the differences in the media used and the resulting affordances and possible audiences offer an important view into the history of how people have used them.

1. Silvio Bedini: The Pope’s Elephant, New York 2000, 1. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 7. ↩︎
3. Ibid., 207. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 38, 43. ↩︎
5. Ibid. 92-95. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 142-143. ↩︎
7. Elephant bones were discovered under the Vatican in the 1960’s which very likely are the remains of Hanno. Danny Lewis: There’s an Elephant Buried Underneath the Vatican, in: Smithsonian Magazine, 21.10.2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/theres-elephant-buried-beneath-vatican-180957013/ (21.7.2025). ↩︎
8. Encyclopedia Britannica: Harambe, in: Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/animal/Harambe (22.7.2025). ↩︎
9. Mike McPhate: Gorilla Killed After Child Enters Enclosure at Cincinnati Zoo, in: The New York Times, 30.05.2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/gorilla-killed-after-child-enters-enclosure-at-cincinnati-zoo.html (21.7.2025). ↩︎
10. Harambe the Gorilla [Database Entry], Know Your Meme, created by Don Caldwell in 2016, updated by Literally Austin in 2025, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/harambe-the-gorilla#fn32 (21.7.2025). ↩︎
11. Ibid. See also: McPhate: Gorilla Killed After Child Enters Enclosure. ↩︎
12. Some of the latest being in posts on X about Ozzy Osbourne’s death in July 2025: https://x.com/acatcalledkeith/status/1948416424885518849 (30.7.2025). ↩︎
13. Bedini: The Pope’s Elephant, 166-167. ↩︎
14. Ibid., 183-184. ↩︎
15. Kreps, Daniel: Hear Elon Musk’s Surprise Rap Song ‘RIP Harambe’, in: Rolling Stone, 31.03.2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/elon-musk-rap-song-rip-harambe-815813/ (31.7.2025). ↩︎
16. Ibid., 152. ↩︎
17. Pietro d’Aretino (attributed): The Last Will and Testament of Hanno the Elephant, cited and translated in Bedini: The Pope’s Elephant, 155-159, here 158. ↩︎
18. Ibid., 155-159. ↩︎
19. Bedini: The Pope’s Elephant, 154-155. ↩︎
20. Ibid., 154. ↩︎
21. A contemporary anonymous woodcut depicts Barabello as an ass riding atop Hanno, for example. Ibid. 93. ↩︎
22. Harambe the Gorilla [Database Entry], KnowYourMeme, 2016/2025. ↩︎
23. Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden: Justice for Harambe Online Petition, Change.org, 29.5.2016, https://www.change.org/p/cincinnati-zoo-justice-for-harambe (21.7.2025). ↩︎
24. Harambe the Gorilla [Database Entry], KnowYourMeme, 2016/2025. ↩︎
25. Bedini: The Pope’s Elephant, 152. ↩︎
26. Ibid., 105. ↩︎
27. Anonymous: Note to Pasquino, cited and translated in Bedini: The Pope’s Elephant, 104-105. ↩︎
28. Alex Heigl: Harambe the Gorilla Continues to Surface Online as a Meme, in: People, 15.08.2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20190323164301/https://people.com/celebrity/harambe-gorilla-continues-to-surface-online-as-a-meme/ (21.7.2025). ↩︎
29. Harambe the Gorilla [Database Entry], KnowYourMeme, 2016/2025. ↩︎
30. Carmen Chai: Harambe’s Death: Is the Parent Shaming Over Gorilla’s Death Going Overboard? in: Global News, 01.06.2016,  https://globalnews.ca/news/2734588/harambes-death-is-the-parent-shaming-over-gorillas-death-going-overboard/ (31.7.2025). ↩︎
31. Kim Stalwood: The Topsy Project, https://www.topsytheelephant.com/ (2.8.2025) ↩︎
32. Killing of Cecil the Lion [Database Entry], Wikipedia, 29.7.2015, updated 17.8.2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Cecil_the_lion (2.8.2025). ↩︎