Bandinelli was trained as a goldsmith by his father, Michelangelo di Viviani de' Bandini, who was patronized by the Medici Family. Showing a marked predilection for sculpture, he worked under the sculptor Giovanni Francesco Rustici and became one of the principal artists at the court of the Medicis, grand dukes of Tuscany. He founded an academy for artists in the Vatican (1531) and one in Florence (c. 1550). Accounts of Bandinelli given in Giorgio Vasari (Vasari, Giorgio)'s Lives and in the Autobiography of the sculptor Benvenuto Cellini (Cellini, Benvenuto) represent him as jealous, malignant, and untalented. He assumed the surname Bandinelli in 1530.

Bandinelli's surviving works prove him to have been a more distinguished sculptor than his contemporaries allowed. His copy of the Laocoön (Uffizi, Florence), his statue of Hercules and Cacus (1534; Piazza della Signoria), and his reliefs on the choir screen of Florence Cathedral explain the vogue that his austere, rather arid work enjoyed at the Medici court. In later life his sculpture was supplanted by the works of Cellini and Bartolommeo Ammannati (Ammannati, Bartolommeo). Shortly before his death Bandinelli, aided by his son Clemente, sculpted his own tomb (1554; Santissima Annunziata, Florence), noted for its Dead Christ Supported by Nicodemus (the latter figure a self-portrait).