He was born in Cavallerleone in Piedmont. A royal subsidy provided by Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy enabled him to apprentice with the royal academy of sculpture in Turin under Claudio Francesco Beaumont. In 1765 he traveled to Rome where he trained under the Piedmontese brothers Ignazio and Filippo Collino. In 1770, he completed a statue of the Ecstasy of Mary Magdalen for the Casale Monferrato Cathedral.
In 1774 Victor Amadeus III made Bernero court sculptor. After a second stay in Rome in 1778, Bernero became professor at the Accademia Reale in Turin. Shortly thereafter (Bernero's chronology remains uncertain) he created an Assumption with Angels (1780; Turin, San Francesco d’Assisi), in the Baroque scenographic tradition that so appealed to him.
There is evidence that Bernero might have been moving away from the Baroque to a Neo-classical style in works after 1780, as in his History of Saint Evasio (Casale, Cathedral), but the obscure chronology of his later years makes it difficult to trace his stylistic changes with certainty. Bernero had two artist sons: Vittorio Amadeo Bernero was a sculptor and Luigi Bernero was a gifted portrait painter. Luigi learnt this skill perhaps from his father, who had demonstrated his own talent in this area in, for instance, the series of marble medallions containing likenesses of members of the royal house of Savoy (c. 1780; Royal Palace of Turin).
