Visitors to Oxford's Ashmolean Museum are being asked to raise £200,000 to buy two 15th century Italian paintings.

The two Renaissance-era panels

The Renaissance panels are being offered to the museum in Beaumont Street by an anonymous seller who wants them to stay in Britain rather than being sold abroad.

The asking price for the pair of paintings, entitled The Early History of Achilles, is £1.3m, but museum staff believe grant funding could be obtained to buy them if the public raised £200,000. The museum lacks a major example of secular, domestic art based on mythology, and the panels would provide this.

Curator Dr Catherine Whistler said: "An export licence exists for the paintings, so potentially they could be sold abroad at any time, but the seller is patient and very loyal and wants to sell the paintings to us if we could raise the asking price within a few months.

"The paintings have been valued at £2m, so we would be getting them for a substantial discount."