HE IS there in the picture, if you care to look for him. Amongst the soldiers, close to the pained Christ that Judas has just betrayed with a kiss, is the man believed to be Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610). Holding up a lantern to better see the face of the betrayed man, the painter implicates himself, and by extension us, in this jostling, vivid Taking of Christ (1602).

It is pure Caravaggio, this demand to complicity. And yet a curious coincidence, too, if we are to believe that this dark haired onlooker is the brilliant yet notorious 16th century painter, bar brawler and murderer. For the painting itself was lost in full sight for centuries, believed by its Roman owners, the Mattei family (who originally commissioned it) to be by one of Caravaggio’s many followers, the Dutch painter Gerrit van Honthorst. It was under these auspices that it was sold to the Scottish collector William Hamilton Nisbet in 1802, alongside six other paintings from the Mattei collection.

The painting is one of the stars of this exhibition of Caravaggesque painters, from Ribera to Honthorst, who drew on the innovative, radical painter who had reinterpreted secular and biblical tropes with visceral, human brilliance. Originating last year in the National Gallery in London, then moving to Dublin, Beyond Caravaggio is the first exhibition of Caravaggesque painters, created in collaboration with the National Galleries of Ireland and Scotland. It is a British and Irish affair, largely made up from the collections in these islands.

Yet if, at heart, the material on display here is similar to the original exhibition, albeit with the loss of a few paintings including Caravaggio’s superb Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, the thrust is different. In London, the exhibition proceeded chronologically, marking the development of Caravaggism. In Edinburgh, the exhibition is thematic, partly, says Chief Curator Aiden Weston-Lewis, because the RSA offers so much more space.

The interplay between secular and religious is instructive. Many of Caravaggio’s works deemed too radical for the church were snapped up by eager noblemen. The influences are ranged around the walls – the darting eyes, the shadows, the thrust of light. To couch it very broadly, the southern artistic interest in drama; the northern artists captivated by Caravaggio’s darkness and atmosphere. Everywhere is clear the rapid ripple of ideas across continents, from the immediate circle of Carvaggio to those who had perhaps never even seen one of his paintings. So, too, the idea of candlelight amongst all this darkening drama flitting across the Alps from the paintbrush of Honthurst, whose fabulous Christ before the High Priest glows in the centre of the main gallery.

Elsewhere, the roistering bar scenes, the rough and cut of gamblers dens, ranging around the walls here as if we ourselves are in some brash, bawdy back room. A reflection, perhaps, of Caravaggio’s own social life. In another room, the somewhat gratuitous nudity wantonly brushed on in the pursuit of “authenticity”, the graphic violence of the bread and butter Old Testament themes. “Biblical” is the word for this slew of flesh and steel, although there is a very real discomfort in a work such as Susannah and the Elders (1622) by Artemesia Gentileschi (in fact her second and less intense treatment of the subject) in which we catch the nude Susannah, caught in humiliating awareness of the leering elders.

These are dramatic, dark-hued paintings, domineering, powerful in their mass. And yet it is thoughtfully done. On one wall, three candle-lit paintings, one by the so-called Candlelight Master, a new loan for Edinburgh, transported from its usual position above a fireplace in a private collection in London.

The large central room houses the two large-scale Caravaggio works (of just four in the exhibition), The Supper at Emmaus and The Taking of Christ, surrounded by works themed around the Life of Christ. Here is Giovanni Galli’s visceral Christ Displaying his Wounds (1625-35), as if insisting we Doubting Thomas’s poke our own finger into his all-too realistic wound. This is pure Caravaggism, the subjects bringing the viewers into the action, implicating them.

There is a veil of confusion in the history of Caravaggism as for centuries, works were frequently misattributed, such was the level of cross-pollination, influence, commonality of themes, and latterly, perhaps, a lack of truly looking. Amongst others, Valentin de Boulogne’s engaging “A Concert with Three Figures” (c.1615) was long misattributed to Caravaggio.

But most gallingly for the National Gallery, Weston-Lewis tells me, was the Caravaggio attributed to Honthurst. The Taking of Christ, in Hamilton Nisbet’s collection for over a century, was offered to the Gallery as part of a bequest by his last descendant in 1921. The Board rejected a number of paintings from the collection, deeming them mere copies, which were subsequently auctioned, at low price, a few months later. Amongst them was Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ, the only Caravaggio ever to have been held in Scotland. It eventually found its way to Ireland to preside over the mealtimes of Jesuit priests before being “rediscovered” and loaned, indefinitely, to Ireland’s own National Gallery.

Beyond Caravaggio, National Gallery of Scotland, The Mound, Edinburgh until September 24

www.nationalgalleries.org