He studied the liberal arts in Paris, and later, perhaps between 1262 and 1268, according to Birkenmajer, canon law in Padua, continuing to take an interest in mathematical and physical studies. In 1269 he met the Dominican friar William of Moerbeke at the papal court in Viterbo and urged him to translate certain mathematical and physical writings of Archimedes, Eutocius, and Hero, which the Dominican did indeed translate that year and which Vitello used. Around 1274 he must have completed his celebrated work Perspectiva, dedicated to Friar William, in which he follows in the footsteps of no less celebrated works by Euclid, Ptolemy, and Alhazen. A second stay at the papal court took place between 1276 and 1278. He must have died shortly thereafter.
In addition to the Perspectiva and a Tractatus de primaria causa penitentiae et de natura daemonum “quem fecit...” (see title, studying canon law... during Easter vocations” (ms. lat. 14796 of the Bibliothèque nationale de Paris), C. Baeumker had attributed to Vitello the short treatise De intelligentiis, which later Baeumker himself recognized as the work of a certain Master Adam “pulchra mulieris,” not further identified. The attribution had been motivated by certain similarities of Neoplatonic concepts regarding the so-called “metaphysics of light,” which seemed to be found in this work as in the Perspectiva. But Birkenmajer rightly observed that the Neoplatonic tone of Vitello’s philosophy, as well as certain of his ideas on the afterlife, prophetic visions, and divining dreams, can be sufficiently explained by his familiarity with the writings of Avicenna and Al-Ghazali, and, as regards the “metaphysics of light,” with the writings of Robert Grosseteste.