Painter and printmaker Armando Pizzinato was born in Maniago, Italy on October 7, 1910. After his father died when Armando was fifteen, financial responsibility fell to him as the eldest child and son, and he took up work as an apprentice housepainter while attending the Royal Complementary School in Licino. There, he studied drawing under painter Pio Rossi. Following graduation he found work as an interior decorator's apprentice and then as a bank clerk. By the mid 1920s Pizziato's talent became apparent to his manager, who secured funds from the bank's Board of Directors to fund private lessons with Rossi beginning in 1926. 

By 1930s his family's financial situation is greatly improved when his mother builds a rental flat on her home in Licino. This allows him to freedom to enroll in the Accademy of Fine Arts, Venice. Pizzinato had by this time become involved in progressive socialist movements, but political upheaval underway signals the spread of Italian fascism, and his options for exhibiting are limited. His first participation in a major exhibition took place in the II Regional Veneta of the Fascist Union of the Decorative Arts in 1931.

In 1933 he and four other painters were given a show, titled, "Five Young Painters from Veneto," in 1933 at the Gallery II Milone in Milan. This helped garner attention for Pizzinato's work, he began exhibiting regularly in Milan and Venice. In 1935 he traveled to Rome for the first time to participate in the Exhibition of Littorali of Culture and Arts, a fascist arts group, and the following year he was given a scholarship to live and work in Rome by the Istituta Maragnoni. In 1940 he was awarded the second Premio Bergamo award at the National Painting Exhibition in Rome, and by 1942 he had earned several awards for his work and continued to exhibtion in Rome while also teaching at the Academy of Fine Art. 

The political tides turned for Pizzinato in August 1943, when the Galleria II Milone, where he frequently exhibited and where several of his work were currently held, was bombed by the Allies on the night of the 8th. Four days later, his daughter Patrizia was born to his wife, Zaira, in Venice. These two events soon convinced Pizzinato he couldn't participate in the cultural circles of a fascist government, and that he must, in fact, actively resist. He abandoned his art career to join the Resistance movement. Using the pseudonym Stefanom he joined the Garibaldi Brigade "F. Biancotto," a partisan formation of the Volunteer Corps of Freedom, working out of his home as the operator of a press to disseminate anti-fascist propaganda. He continued with this work until January of 1945, when he was captured and imprisoned until the end of the war.  

In 1946 he once again took up painting, and found employment as an life drawing teacher at the Free School of the Academy of the Arts in Venice. He cofounded the Fronte Nouvo delle Arti, and helped organize their first exhibition at the Galleries dell'Arco, titled "Grandi tempera partigiane," to critical acclaim. By the late 1940s he established himself once again as a leading painter in Milan, Venice, and Rome, and was invited to participate in the Museum of Modern Art, New York's major 1949 exhibition, "Twentieth Century Italian Art."

Pizzinato embarked on a succussful career throughout the 1950s and '60s that took him to exhibitions throught Europe and beyond, earning awards and accolades not only from art institutions but from the Italian government, as well. In addition to his paintings, drawings, and prints, he was a designer for theater and opera and a muralist. in 1996 a major retrospecitve of his work, "Pizzinato: Works, 1925-1994," was held at Villa Manin in Passariano, concordant with the publication of a monograph by Electo. 

Armando Pizzinato died on April 17, 2004, in Venice. In 2005 his daughter created the Armando Pizzinato Archive, housed in the Bugno Art Gallery in Venice, which includes manuscripts, letters, photographs, and other ephemera held for preservation. In 2010, the city of Pordenone named it's new headquarters for it Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery of the artist. 

An in-depth biography of the artist can be found on his estate's website (Italian).