Harem                                                                                                                                      

The 80 paintings of French, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and British artists of the so-called "orientalist" school offer glimpses of the pleasures of the harem, where the wives, mistresses and female relatives of well-to-do Muslims lived.

But these are works of imagination by definition, as the harem was part of the household off-limits to males who were not castrated. Eunuchs and slave girls usually served the women.

The paintings pass from sensual fairies of the "Thousand and one nights" -- which was also evoked by Mozart in his "The Abduction from the Seraglio" -- to the sombre faces of north African slave markets.

The female nudes of Jean-Leon Gerome's "Moorish bath" flank scenes of North African Arab life depicted in the paintings of Eugene Delacroix's "Woman from Algiers" or the "Odalisque" of Jean-Baptiste Ingres.

Odalisques were the Christian slaves of the harem, at the bottom of the social ladder, hoping to become concubines to the sultan but usually not serving him but rather his wives and mistresses as personal chambermaids.

Tayfun Begin, the Istanbul-born director of the Fine Arts museum of Krems, 60 kilometres (40 miles) northwest of Vienna, said 1,200 women and girls vied for the favors of the Ottoman Sultan in the harem of his palace of Topkapi Saray in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Begin said the palace had its own hierarchy, code of conduct as well as plenty of intrigue in what was a veritable city of 40,000 inhabitants where the sultan's mother held order.

The women were guarded by up to 800 eunuchs, men who were sexually mutilated and generally black slaves.

While the harem was seen in western imagination as a place of romance, the reality was different, according to people who lived there.

"The harem must have been a place of passionate love in the beginning, but in reality it was a false institution, devoid of all sensuality," wrote the Hungarian princess May Torok, who lived in the harem of Cairo in the beginning of the 20th century as a wife of the last Turkish viceroy of Egypt.

Turkish historians have meanwhile presented the harem as a "school" for women, where the most intelligent concubines could even aspire to become the mother of a future sultan.

Besides the paintings, the exhibition also features a series of photographs of mundane-looking women, taken around 1860 by the Shah of Iran in his harem in Teheran.