Luscious reds in gold: Works such as the 16th-century Dormition of the Mother of God were created with egg tempura, gold leaf and gesso on linen.

According to a recipe compiled by a Greek monk in the 1700s, snail slime is a superb binding agent when mixing gold paint to make icons. Gold, after all, was crucial to icon painting: its resplendent, reflective surface sang richly of spirituality and the divine. Using something as earthly as snail mucus, though, perhaps kept things unintentionally grounded and well-adhered to a timber panel.

This painter's manual, with 72 instructions and recipes, is described by the director of the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Gordon Morrison, as a fascinating document one that includes recipes for many of the glorious, deep colours that grace icons. Those colours, though, often involved dangerous manufacturing methods and most of them are highly toxic. "They were really poisonous, noxious materials," Morrison says.

Take, for example, that luscious, rich red that is used frequently in these paintings. Making it, the manual tells us, involved the creation of cinnabar heating up mercury and powdered sulphur, then repeatedly stirring, grinding and smothering the amalgam, a process that would have exposed the artisan to excessively noxious fumes. This mix was then suspended in egg yolk tempera, with some raki or vodka for good measure.

Golden touch: The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, circa 1700, features the gold leaf so crucial to icon painting.

The most hazardous thing about making gold paint was how it affected snails: Morrison says extraction of their slime involved prodding the poor creatures with something very hot.

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Here, though, are the results in a glorious exhibition of icons curated by Morrison, with works drawn from the 12th century to the 1800s. The history of icons arcs over 1500 years, but Morrison says they have often been downplayed and not well-collected by Western art museums.

"There has been a lot of prejudice against them," he says. "They look odd and primitive and don't conform to all the things in the Western canon about being original and new every second year. This art is ageless. Apply the same kind of understanding to these works as you do to Hindu or Buddhist statuary and you might come to a better understanding of them."

While these icons are deeply rooted in Orthodox Christianity, their appeal is extraordinarily broad: as Morrison observes, we might approach them in the same way the uninitiated might see bark painting, not knowing the indigenous stories behind them. On a purely aesthetic and emotional level, we might enter into such artworks' deep sense of spirituality and connectedness to human nature.

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'Eikon: Icons of the Orthodox Christian World' displays eerie power at Art Gallery of Ballarat exhibition