International Catacomb Society directors and staff send warmest birthday wishes to Society advisor, Dr. John J. Herrmann, Jr, director emeritus of the Art of the Ancient World Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  John has been a wonderful resource for the ICS for many years, and we hope for many years to come!  As successor at the MFA to longtime Classical Art curator Cornelius Clarkson Vermeule III, an ICS founding director, John has stayed connected to ICS in all phases of its growth, from 1980 to the present, and, in recent years, has only increased his commitment to furthering its academic goals and making it live up to its potential as an international collective (if anything, raising the bar to new heights with his own extensive travels and research on Greco-Roman antiquities).  We must work even harder to justify his faith in ICS's potential!

It is exciting also to share that John, together with his wife, ICS vice president Annewies van den Hoek, will be lecturing at the Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity Twelfth Biennial Conference: "The Fifth Century: Age of Transformation" at Yale Univeristy on Friday, March 24, 2017 on the topic "From Bowls to Lamps: Migration of motifs in African Red Slip ware" (click here for abstract).  Well worth attending!  Listening to John means you not only learn from one expert on Ancient material culture, but also receive what he learned from others, as part of an academic "family tree" that reaches back to Richard Krautheimer's generation, and beyond.  

Best birthday wishes, and heartfelt thanks to John and his family on this special day (March 16, 2017)!

Image - John (left) and ICS Advisor, Prof. Paolo Liverani (Università degli Studi di Firenze) in Rome in February of 2017.