This study investigates descriptive temporality in Nezami Ganjavi’s Haft-Peykar through a comparative analysis of poetic text and pictorial representation in Persian manuscript painting. Although Haft-Peykar has been widely examined from literary, iconographic, and stylistic perspectives, the temporal organization of description and its visual reconstruction have received comparatively limited attention. Within structuralist narratology, Philippe Hamon’s account of descriptive discourse explains how description interrupts narrative progression, expands semantic organization, and transforms the reader’s experience of time. Rather than treating Hamon’s reflections as a fixed model directly applicable to visual representation, this study reconstructs a descriptive temporal framework inspired by his conceptualization of descriptive discourse. The framework is organized around three interrelated dimensions—pause, semantic density, and repetition—which serve as operational categories for examining the temporal organization of poetic language and pictorial composition. The study focuses on two illustrated manuscripts of Nezami’s Khamsa, dated 938 AH and 997 AH, preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Analysis is limited to the seven dome narratives of Haft-Peykar, where descriptive passages provide a principal mechanism connecting poetic expression with visual representation. Employing a descriptive-comparative methodology, relevant poetic passages were first classified according to their dominant descriptive or narrative functions. Corresponding illustrations were then examined through the proposed framework, with pause, semantic density, and repetition analyzed in relation to compositional stability, figural stasis, chromatic organization, spatial enclosure, ornamental accumulation, motif recurrence, and directional movement. The purpose was not merely to identify iconographic correspondences between text and image, but to determine how each medium reorganizes narrative time through descriptive structures and produces distinctive modes of temporal perception. The findings demonstrate that descriptive temporality constitutes a shared organizational principle in both literary and visual dimensions of Haft-Peykar, although each medium realizes it through different formal mechanisms. In the poem, descriptive pause emerges through relative suspension of action, lexical accumulation, metaphorical elaboration, and chromatic vocabulary, slowing narrative progression and encouraging contemplative reading. In the paintings, pause is reconstructed through compositional balance, restrained bodily movement, symmetrical arrangements, and spatial stability that prolong engagement with the pictorial surface. Semantic density likewise operates differently across the two media. In the poem, it results from accumulated descriptive vocabulary, symbolic references, and layered metaphors. In the paintings, it is generated through architectural articulation, ornamental elaboration, chromatic richness, and the coexistence of multiple symbolic motifs within a single visual field, inviting prolonged perceptual exploration. Repetition forms the third dimension of descriptive temporality. Recurrent lexical structures and descriptive patterns correspond to recurring motifs, geometric rhythms, ornamental sequences, and repeated visual configurations. Rather than functioning merely as decoration, repetition establishes continuity, reinforces symbolic meaning, and reorganizes temporal perception beyond linear narrative succession. The comparison also reveals significant differences between the two manuscripts. The 938 AH manuscript constructs descriptive temporality through visual abundance, employing numerous figures, decorative motifs, architectural complexity, and chromatic variation to extend the duration of visual observation. By contrast, the 997 AH manuscript produces a more concentrated descriptive temporality through compositional restraint, reduced ornamentation, and condensation of symbolic meaning within a controlled pictorial structure. These contrasting strategies demonstrate that descriptive temporality does not depend on visual complexity alone but may be achieved through different modes of pictorial organization. In both manuscripts, temporal experience is shaped less by sequential narration than by sustained acts of perception that repeatedly redirect attention from narrative action toward symbolic contemplation. The study therefore argues that these visual configurations can be understood as a pictorial reconstruction of the descriptive temporal pattern conceptualized by Hamon rather than as a direct application of his literary theory. The proposed framework distinguishes Hamon’s theoretical reflections on descriptive discourse from the operational model developed for interpreting Persian manuscript painting. Within this reconstructed model, pause, semantic density, and repetition function as interconnected dimensions through which descriptive temporality becomes visually intelligible. Ritual repetition is additionally introduced as a complementary interpretive category for explaining forms of symbolic continuity emerging from the cultural and visual logic of Persian manuscript illustration, without attributing this category to Hamon’s original formulation. This approach also highlights the importance of medium-specific transformation: textual description unfolds through linguistic succession, whereas pictorial description operates through simultaneous visual relations. Consequently, the viewer’s temporal experience is not simply equivalent to the reader’s experience, but is produced through a different configuration of attention, duration, and symbolic association. The framework therefore provides a basis for comparing literary and visual temporality without reducing one medium to the other in detail. Overall, the study demonstrates that the miniatures of Haft-Peykar should not be regarded merely as visual translations of literary narration, but as autonomous descriptive systems that reconstruct temporal experience through specifically pictorial means. By comparatively applying a theoretically grounded framework to poetic and visual narratives, the research offers a transferable methodology for investigating descriptive temporality in Persian manuscript painting and contributes to dialogue among narratology, visual semiotics, and Islamic art history.