....Caravaggio use a dark, red-brown background on which they place the
thickest shadows, and paint directly by shading toward the shadows. The
painting is transformed. Things jump out of the background, colors
spring from the common base that attests to their obscure nature,
figures are defined by there covering more than their contour. Yet this
is not the opposite of light; on the contrary, it is by virtue of the
new regime of light.

.... A whiteness is produced through all the tiny inner mirrors. It
makes white, but shadow too: it makes the white that is confounded with
the illuminated area of the monad, that soon becomes obscure or shades
toward the dark background,... It is the relativity of clarity (as much
as of movement), the inseparability of clarity from obscurity, the
effacement of contour- in short, the opposition to Descartes, who
remained a man of the Renaissance, from the double point of view of a
physics of light and a logic of the idea.

Clarity endlessly plunges into obscurity. Chiaroscuro fills the monad
following a series that can move in either of two directions: at one end
is a dark background and at the other is light, sealed; when it is lit,
the monad produces white light in an area set aside, but the white is
progressively shaded, giving way to obscurity, to a thicker shadow, as
it spreads toward the dark background in the whole monad. Outside of the
series we have God on one side, who said let there be light, and with
the white-mirror, but on the other side the shadows or absolute
blackness, made up of an infinitely spongy and cavernous matter
ultimately contains all of these holes. ...and matter, forced back under
the waters, is almost reduced to nothing.

.... Leibniz is dangerous, a good German who needs facades and
philosophies of facades, but bold and basically mysterious in the
extreme. The courtly wig is a facade, an entry, like the vow to hurt no
one's established feelings, and the art of presenting his system from
the point of view of another, in such and such a mirror, following the
apparent intelligence of a correspondent or of an opponent knocking on
his door, while the System itself is up above, turning about itself,
ceding absolutely nothing to the compromises, down below, whose secret
he keeps, taking, on the contrary, "the best of all sides" in order to
deepen or make another fold in the room with closed doors and with
sealed windows, the room in which Leibniz is confined when he states,
"Everything is always the same, with degrees of perfection excepted."
[Deleuze, Gilles _The Fold_ pp 31-33]

Didn't Derek Jarman make a film about me, called Caravaggio? I would
like to see again that film. Maybe it is available on video.

With the best of all possible wishes,

Caravaggio.