The first recorded payment to Donatello by the Domopera, or Cathedral authorities, was made in November 1406, when he received ten golden florins as an instalment towards his work on the two prophets for the North door of the church, which is rather inaccurately described in the early documents as facing the Via de’ Servi.  Fifteen months later he received the balance of six florins.  These two marble figures, small as they are, and placed high above the gables, are not very noticeable, but they contain the germ of much which was to follow.  The term “prophet” can only be applied to them by courtesy, for they are curly-haired boys with free and open countenances; one of them happens to hold a scroll and the other wears a chaplet of bay leaves.  There is a certain charm about them, a freshness and vitality which reappears later on when Donatello was making the dancing children for the Prato pulpit and the singing gallery for the Cathedral.  The two prophets, particularly the one to the right, are clothed with a skill and facility all the more remarkable from the fact that some of the statues made soon afterwards, show a stiff and rigid treatment of drapery.  Closely allied to these figures is a small marble statue, about three feet high, belonging to Madame Edouard Andre in Paris.  It is a full-length figure of a standing youth, modelled with precision, and intended to be placed in a niche or against a background.  Like the prophets just described, it has a high forehead, while the drapery falls in strong harmonious lines, a corner being looped up over the left arm.  It is undoubtedly by Donatello, being the earliest example of his work in any collection, public or private, and on that account of importance, apart from its intrinsic merits.

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[Sidenote:  The Cathedral Facade.]

Donatello soon received commissions for statues of a more imposing scale to be placed on the ill-fated facade of the Cathedral.  All beautiful within, the churches of Florence are singularly poor in those rich facades which give such scope to the sculptor and architect, conferring, as at Pisa, distinction on a whole town.  The churches of the Carmine, Santo Spirito and San Lorenzo are without facades at all, presenting graceless and unfinished masonry in place of what was intended by their founders.  Elsewhere there are late and florid facades alien to the spirit of the main building, while it has been left to our own generation to complete Santa Croce and the Cathedral.  The latter, it is true, once had a facade, which, though never finished, was ambitiously planned.  A large section of it was, however, erected in Donatello’s time, but was removed for no reason which can be adequately explained, except that on the occasion of a royal marriage it was thought necessary to destroy what was contrived in the maniera tedesca, substituting a sham painted affair which was speedily ruined by the elements.  The ethics