In my opinion, it's just the "Salieri's touch".
Personally, I don't like it, but when I see a movie for the first time, and even I'm not a movie pro, I can easily tell if it's something from the Salieri's studios.
So from this point of view, he succeeded: he's the only director I can name just by seeing a still picture of one of his movies
I don't know his story, but his movies often talks about war and religion. So I guess it's a result of some kind of ****hood trauma.
Anyway, he does it on purpose.