LANDIVAR, RAFAEL. - Jesuit, humanist, b. at Guatemala on 29 Oct. 1731, d. at Bologna on 27 Sept. 1793. After teaching rhetoric and philosophy in the colleges of the Order at Puebla and Guatemala, he was expelled from his homeland by the decrees of Carlo III of Spain and, after various wanderings, found refuge in Bologna.
The work that earned him the title of “American Virgil” is the Rusticatio Mexicana seu variora quaedam ex agris Mexicanis decerpta (Modena 1781; 2nd enlarged ed., Bologna 1789), in which, in ten books and in clear Virgilian verses echoing the Georgiche, he offers the most vivid and picturesque descriptions of the customs and manners and natural beauties of his homeland.
BIBL.: Sommervogel, IV, col. 1457; J. Villacorta, Estudios bibliogr. sobre R. L., Guatemala 1924 (with the corrections of A. Perez, La fe de erratos del libro «Estudios...», in Anales de la Soc. de geogr. e hist. de Guatemala, 14 (1937), pp. 39-46); D. Vela, L., ibid., 18 (1943), pp. 327-38. Celestino Testore