Amiranashvili was born in the small mountainous Georgian town of Oni (then part of the Kutais Governorate, Russian Empire) in a local teacher's family. He was among the first graduates of the newly founded Tbilisi State University (TSU) in 1922. After spending two years in Moscow and Leningrad, where he specialized in Old Russian and Byzantine arts, Amiranashvili taught at the TSU and Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. He was placed in charge of the Department of History and Theory of Arts at the TSU in 1925 and earned a degree of professor in 1936. From 1939 to 1975, he was a director of the Art Museum of Georgia. In 1945, he was sent by the Soviet government to Paris to oversee the repatriation of the Georgian antiquities evacuated to France following the 1921 Bolshevik takeover of Georgia.