Tancredi Parmeggiani was born on September 25, 1927, in Feltre, near Belluno, Italy. He became a friend of Emilio Vedova while studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice in 1946. The following year he visited Paris. From 1948 to 1949 he divided his time between Venice and Feltre. His first solo show took place at the Galleria Sandri in Venice in 1949. Tancredi moved to Rome in 1950, where he associated with the Age d’Or group, which sponsored exhibitions and publications of the international avant-garde.

He participated in an exhibition of abstract Italian art at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome in 1951. The same year the artist settled in Venice, where he met Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a studio space and exhibited his work in her palazzo in 1954. He was awarded the Graziano Prize for painting in Venice in 1952. During the same year Tancredi and others signed the manifesto of the Movimento Spazialista, a group founded by Lucio Fontana in Milan around 1947 advocating a new “spatial” art appropriate to the postwar era.

He was given solo exhibitions at the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice in 1952, 1953, 1956, and 1959, and at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in 1953. In 1954 he participated in the Tendances actuelles exhibition with Georges Mathieu, Jackson Pollock, Wols, and others at the Kunsthalle Bern. His work was included in a group show in 1955 at the Galerie Stadler in Paris, a city he visited again that year. In 1958 Tancredi was given solo exhibitions at the Saidenberg Gallery in New York and the Hanover Gallery in London, and took part in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. In 1959 he settled in Milan, where he showed several times at the Galleria dell’Ariete. That same year Tancredi traveled again to Paris and in 1960 he visited Norway. Also in 1960 the painter participated in the Anti-Procès exhibition at the Galleria del Canale in Venice, where he also had solo shows in 1960 and 1962. He received the Marzotto Prize in Valdagno, Italy, in 1962 and exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1964. Tancredi died of suicide in Rome on September 27, 1964.