Everett Fahy, a prominent historian of Florentine painters from the late 15th and early 16th centuries who joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a young curator and left to run the Frick Collection before returning to the Met as its chairman of European paintings, died on April 23 in Davis, Calif. He was 77.

His brother, David, his only survivor, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Fahy (pronounced fay) became the Met’s curator in charge of European paintings, one of the museum’s most prestigious departments, in his late 20s. One of his tasks was to reorganize the collection so that pictures were arranged by national schools, identified by walls that were painted in different dark colors.

“The most common reaction, even from people who have been here 30 years, is that we’ve cleaned the pictures,” Mr. Fahy told The New Yorker in 1971. “But it’s the dark backgrounds — they’ve removed the old masters dinginess and given the paintings a kind of rich glow.” He added, “Our Impressionist paintings now look the way people thought they did in the 19th century.”

Writing in The New York Times, the critic John Canaday praised the reorganization for creating a “historical continuity” that went “beyond anything the Metropolitan has managed before.” ...