Armando Pizzinato was born on October 7, 1910, in Maniago, Italy. After World War I he moved to Pordenone with his family, where his father was driven to suicide because of serious financial problems. After working as a decorator and a bank messenger, he enrolled in the Accademia di Belle Arti of Venice in 1930, where he trained under the painter Virgilio Guidi and met Giulio Turcato and Alberto Viani. He befriended Afro Basaldella and associated with Giuseppe Santomaso and Carlo Scarpa.

His debut as a painter came in 1933 in a group show at the Galleria Il Milione in Milan. In 1936 he went to Rome, where he frequented Renato Guttuso’s studio and met the artists of the Scuola romana and Turin’s Gruppo dei Sei. He returned to Venice before the outbreak of World War II, where he continued painting, holding his first solo exhibition at the Botteghe d’arte in 1941. Two years later he exhibited again at the Galleria Il Milione and at Carlo Cardazzo’s Galleria del Cavallino, Venice. In September 1943, he stopped painting to join the anti-Fascist Resistance. In 1945 he met Emilio Vedova, with whom he would collaborate for several years. The following year he joined the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti (1946-50), a politicized group of artists who aspired to change Italian culture in the wake of the fall Fascism. The Fronte Nuovo exhibited at the Venice Biennale of 1948, where Peggy Guggenheim acquired a painting by him. His work was included in the Twentieth Century Italian Art exhibition held in 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Following the disbanding of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, he adapted his style to social realism. There followed numerous retrospectives of his work: at the Opera Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice (1962); at the Kusnjezti Most gallery in Moscow, with as many as 180 works that were later exhibited at the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg (1967); at the Correr Museum, Venice (1981); and at the Villa Manin, Passariano (1996). In 1991 he published a book about his hometown, Poffabro luogo magico, in which he fervently denounced its architectural and natural decline. Pizzinato died in his home in Venice on April 17, 2004.