This painting is executed on a single panel which is flat, stable, un-cradled, and beveled on all sides. The paint surface is clean with a fresh varnish. UV light reveals only a couple of tiny retouches scattered in face. This picture should be hung in its current condition. In a carved and painted gilt wood frame
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Although no autograph head of Herod by the Rudolfine court painter Arcimboldo is known today, based on extant similarly composed compositions, there is likely to have been a now lost original. Another portrait of Herod, formerly attributed to Arcimboldo, but now believed to date from the seventeenth century, is in the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck (fig. 1). Both paintings depict Herod the Great (74/73 BC-4BC), the King of Judea, in an oriental outfit and with a sumptuous crowned head scarf. Herod’s face is formed by an amalgam of children's figures, a reference to the Biblical narrative of the Massacre of the Innocents.

Whether an original existed or not, Arcimboldo's influence on painting was profound well into the seventeenth century, and his originality lives on in the present work. Two additional, different versions exist: one formerly in the collection of the Prince of Lichtenstein, now in the Cardazzo collection, Venice and one in the Poletta collection, Brescia.¹ The unusually small scale of the present painting suggests that it was painted to form part of a Kunstkammer or cabinet of curiosities. 

1. B. Geiger, I Dipinti Ghiribizzosi di Giuseppe Arcimboldi: Pittore Illusinista del Cinquecento (1527-1593), Florence 1954, reproduced, plates 82 and 83.