Series of twenty-four marble reliefs, considered among the masterpieces of Florentine sculpture of the 16th century, sculpted by Baccio Bandinelli with the collaboration of Giovanni Bandini and Vincenzo de' Rossi between 1547 and 1572. These were part of the eighty-eight that adorned the exterior of the enclosure of the sixteenth-century choir of the Cathedral, designed by Bandinelli himself, and which, during the restoration of the interior of the Cathedral in 1842, were removed together with the colonnade and the colossal sculptures that decorated the altar, also by Bandinelli, that is, a God blessing, a dead Christ (today at Santa Croce) and, on the back, Adam and Eve (today at the Bargello Museum). The figures in the reliefs, reminiscent of Michelangelo's powerful anatomies in the Sistine Chapel, all vary in appearance, age, sex, pose and shape and probably depict biblical patriarchs, prophets and sibyls. Their identification with characters who lived before the coming of Christ would also symbolically correspond to their original location, outside the enclosure: here they had their backs to the main altar and therefore to the sculpture of the deposed Christ and, during mass, to the Eucharist, where for the Catholic faith the body of the Savior is truly present.

This iconographic project of the choir area, centered on the history of salvation from original sin to the death of Jesus, was completed with the large Last Judgment of the Dome, painted by Vasari and Zuccari starting from 1572.