Pixel This: A Museum of Portraits on Computer : A new wing in London’s National Gallery lets visitors call up celebrated paintings on PCs. No experience necessary.

I can’t imagine how Rembrandt would feel about seeing his “Self-Portrait” displayed at eight bits per pixel on a 19-inch color monitor with a screen resolution of 82 dots per inch--although it is a good likeness.

Or what Claude Monet would say about a signed and dated laser print of his “Water-Lily Pond,” which I brought home from England. The Monet is filed somewhere in my desk drawer near a couple of 16th-Century Bellinis and a Fra Angelico.

I don’t know much about computers but I know what I like, which is all you need to enjoy the state-of-the-art Micro Gallery in the new Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery.

A dozen touch-screen Macintosh computers in this small, first-floor room offer a visual encyclopedia of the Gallery’s collection. Visitors can scan more than 2,200 paintings in this illustrated catalogue and print out a personal tour map of up to 10 selections. The map is free, as is the computer use. A card that costs 1 (about $1.60 U.S.) allows you to print copies of 10 paintings.

The Micro Gallery project--even though it occupies more than a gigabyte of disk space and is said to be the largest system of its kind in the world--was planned for people with no computer experience. You sit at a console and merely touch the screen for what you want.

Say, for example, you’ve allotted 17 minutes to the National Gallery (and if so, say you’re ashamed). You’ve heard about Leonardo da Vinci’s remarkable “The Cartoon,” in its own darkened chamber, and someone said you must see Cezanne’s “Bathers” and Titian’s “Madonna and Child.”

First, you touch the box that says Artists. Next, you touch Leonardo, then select “The Cartoon” from his list of works, and touch the box that says Print Tour. Do the same for Cezanne and Titian.

You’ll receive a floor plan of the Gallery with circles over the rooms where your selections are hung. At the bottom of the Personal Tour page is a checkoff list: “The Cartoon” is in Room 51 near the grand staircase in the Sainsbury Wing; Cezanne is in Room 45 in the original gallery near the Trafalgar Square entrance, and you’ll pass by Titian, in Room 9, on the way there.

If a painting is on loan to another gallery, or has been taken down for restoration, the computer will tell you so and refuse to waste your time--and its--by printing a location on your tour map. If you’re not in a hurry, other computer options bring more information on the background of each artist and each painting.

The Micro Gallery, funded by the American Express Foundation, claims to have more than 300,000 words of supporting text in this refresher course of Art Appreciation.

When people are waiting, an attendant at the front desk puts a time limit on computer use. But on the weekday of my visit, there were empty seats. The white-haired gentleman next to me was intent on printing a black-and-white copy of every Renoir in the collection. Two teen-agers in school uniforms were fast-forwarding through centuries of art, and using big words to argue the merits of a Picasso still life. My guess was that they would rather spend time at the amazing computer screen than wandering through the gallery itself to stand before the originals.

I ended up making a handful of black-and-white laser prints, including Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers,” one of four paintings of sunflowers that Vincent did in August and September of 1888. (The original is in Room 44 of the National Gallery, according to the computer, and a replica that Van Gogh produced in 1889 hangs in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.) Sure it’s better in color, and full-scale, but what a happy souvenir.