Corbino came to the United States with his mother in 1913 to join his father who had already settled in New York. He attended Stuyvesant High School and the Ethical Culture School from which he graduated in 1922. His first training in art was at the Ethical Culture School with Herbert R. Kniffen, who remained a loyal promoter of his work. From 1923 to 1926 Corbino continued his art studies at the Art Students League under Frank Vincent DuMond and George Luks; from 1924 through 1927 he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts's summer school, working under Daniel Garber.
He won Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships in 1936 and 1937. In 1939, when he was not yet forty, the Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, presented an exhibition of his work. From 1938 to 1954, Corbino taught at the Art Students League; he also taught for a time at the Academy School. A regular exhibitor in Academy annuals, he received the Academy's Adolph and Clara Obrig Prize in 1938, the Saltus Medal in 1944, and the Ellin P. Speyer Prize in 1961.
Corbino made his home in Rockport, Massachusetts, and did much of his painting there, but was not notably concerned with the coastal scenery as were so many of the artists who congregated in that community. Rather, he was a painter of large heroic works influenced by artists such as Delacroix and Rubens, taking his themes from the myths and history of his native Sicily, and from dramatic events remembered from his early childhood such as an earthquake, and treacherous crossing of the Atlantic with his mother, and similar contemporary events.
