[1] Defying conventions and her family, she registered at the Brera Academy of Art in Milan, attended Aldo Carpi's special courses in painting and graduated in 1933.
During this period she immersed herself in the buoyant artistic life of Milan, travelled to Paris and Vienna and visited Assisi, where she lived in the monastery to study Giotto's frescos.
To overcome regional and cultural isolation she engaged after World War II until the 1990s in extended travelling in the Mediterranean Basin and Europe, Africa, Central America and China with repeated and prolonged stays in the US.
[4] During her stay in Mainz, Germany, in the early 1970s she took up engraving techniques again, neglected since art school, and through her novel approach this became a significant part of her work.
Spinelli's media were mainly oil paintings of different formats, engravings and mixed techniques, in which she elaborated her graphic work with colour and ink.
Spinelli's work explores individual and societal questions that characterized her long life as an actor and witness of the 20th and early 21st century.
[11] The quests and existential conditions, which encompass the very essence of human life, make up the core of her subjects: hope, joy but also loneliness, silence, memory, fear, separation, oppression, war and hardship.
In Spinelli's words: "It is silent, curious listening: a search for the essence of the object, stripped of the superfluous, with hard work and without complacency.
Spinelli developed a pictorial code characterized by vivid chromatics, dynamism, a wide freedom and complexity in composition, determined by simultaneity and disruption of perspective,[2] where the figure emerges from an abstract spatiality.