The Anatomical Eye Lechaschau, a mountain village west of Garmisch and Innsbruck, provides the backdrop for the early years of Ludwig Schmid-Reutte. The son of Franz Anton Schmid, a peasant farmer who also labored as a builder and stone mason, his path leads from local schooling to the heavy labor of a builder's henchmen in Bavaria. This physical reality shifts in 1878 when he enters the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Under the guidance of Franz Defregger and Ludwig von Löfftz, the focus narrows. He moves away from the periphery of construction toward the intense, clinical study of the human…