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Flashback to Art History 101: It's an 8:30am class -- dark room, blurry slides and a textbook the size of the Louvre. No wonder you slept through most of the course. To see what you missed, why not take a refresher class online?

Art Museums

The WebMuseum Network grew out of Parisian computer consultant Nicolas Pioch's paean to the world's great artists. Learn from historical essays and a glossary of painting styles as you wander through the galleries or locate works by artist or genre. While the museum consists primarily of images in

the public domain -- works by Picasso, for instance, are notably absent -- the collection is vast. Special exhibitions spotlight medieval illuminated manuscripts and paintings by post-impressionist Paul Cezanne.

The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco -- the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor -- have collaborated on an inspired Web project that's all about art access. In addition to online versions of special exhibitions, the museums have built an image database of 60,000 works they say is the largest in the world. You can run searches using an artist's name, medium, subject or other criteria to call up images and brief descriptions of Kandinsky lithographs, for instance, or paintings and photographs chronicling San Francisco's history. Half of the collection currently is available and FAMSF says it's working to put all of it online.

If you'd like to focus on one facet of the arts, the Yahoo! Art History index is a good place to search or browse by artist, movement country and theme.