I suspect that what you are seeing as his head is in fact his helmet which in raised and sitting on the back of his head. Thus the arm, instead of being bent back behind him, is in fact in front of him while he looks toward the lower left corner of the picture.
The original version had much fancier pieces, as you can see. The metal Condottiere piece is quite large and fairly hefty.
The board had a fold added to it for the second edition. This allowed them to reduce the box size to something reasonable. The original box was quite frankly ridiculously huge for what is primarily a card game, no matter how much nicer a non-folding board looks.
An important change was made in the rules between editions to help speed the game up immensely. It is strongly recommended that you play with the new rules no matter which edition you own.
