Connoisseur-style historian of Italian renaissance art; popular textbook writer. Pittaluga was the daughter of an Italian General, though her forbearers were Austrian. She attended the State Secondary School in Cuneo, where she was the only female student. When Lionello Venturi was appointed the new chair of art history at the university in Turin at an extremely young age, Pittaluga was one of his first students. She went on to write her ground-breaking thesis under him on Eugène Fromentin.