'On all sides there was evidence of the Venetian's determination to decorate their city with ornaments and fragments of antiquity brought back from the countries where their merchants traded. Roman remains came from Dalmatia and Istria; examples of early medieval art from the Byzantine cities of northern Italy, while bas-reliefs, inscriptions, marble statues, pictures and the figures of animals were shipped to Venice from the Levant. The façade of San Marco was, and still is, embellished by bas-reliefs, panels, carvings, columns, capitals, porphyry heads and onyx paterae, seized in the wars against Constantinople and Genoa; the four figures in porphyry near the Porta della Carta of the Doge's Palace were probably looted in Acre.'

Christopher Hibbert, Venice, the biography of a city, published by Grafton.