Assen Peikov Biography
Assen Peikov was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1908. After his father's death, he was sent to Shipka Monastery together with his brother to study. He decided to pursue a military career and enrolled in the Sozopol Naval School, where he graduated in 1933. Despite this, his dream was to become a sculptor and he started sculpting small things from an early age. One of his objects, a fish, attracted the attention of Andrei Nikolov, already an established Bulgarian sculptor, who acted as his tutor and helped him enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, where he obtained a diploma with medal gold in 1937. He opened a studio in Sofia, where in 1938 he presented an exhibition that was a great success.
After the exhibition, he traveled to Greece and Yugoslavia to visit the places of classical art. He obtained a visa for Italy in 1938 and moved to Rome, where he found a studio on Via Margutta to work as a sculptor. He met a Roman noblewoman with whom he had a son, but their relationship ended early. In 1944, he became involved with Emilia Boccanera, married to the Marquis Giulio di Sant'Angelo, and their relationship lasted until Assen's death. In 1953, he participated in the International Competition for the Monument to the Unknown Political Prisoner in London, where he was chosen from 316 Italian competitors. In 1960, he won the competition announced by the Municipality of Rome to create the monumental statue of Leonardo Da Vinci in Fiumicino with the idea of depicting the Renaissance genius with his left hand reaching towards the sky and his right hand supporting his invention relating to flight: the aerial screw. Assen Peikov died in 1973, at the age of 65, while working on his last work, the Pietà, in his Studio on Via Margutta in Rome.
